The Roads are Full of Bad Drivers

I have a boss who likes to say, "The world is full of [expletive deleted] heads and they all drive." It is so true and that is the focus of this piece.

To start this document I should relate a certain piece of historical information that when the first two cars were on the road in Detroit, they both "found each other" on a road, collided and that was the first car accident. It is the stuff that legends are made of.

The truth is that to me, driving has always been a religious experience and I mean this literally. When I was an Orthodox Jew, I used to say Tefillat Haderech ("Prayer for the Road") before I would go out on an extended journey. I did this a lot when I was touring with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach as part of his band's chevra ("entourage") years ago.

One day, while I was living at Shlomo's Moshav Me'or Modi'in, we didn't say this prayer when a number of us went on a drive. We hit a large animal and one person in the van said that it happened because we didn't say the prayer. The truth is that the way so many people drive, they should also get religion on the road. Invoking Divine protection should be done just like praying before you eat.

I remember Shlomo telling his eldest daughter, Neshama years ago; that she should always thank God for what she has and ask God for anything because if she doesn't do that, maybe she won't get what she wants. Intelligence isn't enough and pride goes before a fall.

Over 30 years ago, while I was still in high school, someone I knew was killed as a car hit him when he was cleaning the windshield while his brother was driving the car.

They had a closed casket for the wake. They couldn't fix him up for an open viewing. There was a 2-way stop sign and he had the right of way. The car that killed him ran the sign and he was dumped out of his brother's car on his head.

The residents in the area wanted to make that junction a 4-way stop for years but the government did nothing about it. After that incident, the junction was made into a 4-way stop but it took the sacrifice of that poor acquaintance of mine to make it happen.

I also almost got killed about 28 years ago on LI as I was coming back from a doctor's appointment and it had snowed. I hit the brake as I was trying to slow down. My car skidded down a long hill as I crashed into the only car on the road in front of me. God was with me and the car needed some extensive work but I was unscratched.

Around '88, I left a meeting with my boss while I was in corporate training at AT&T and I wound up hitting the gas, when I was trying to hit the brake. Just as my stars would have it, there was only one other car on the road and you guessed right, he and I collided! It cost about 8 thousand dollars to fix both of our cars. Again, I was unscathed.

By the way, even with laser precision tools to realign the car's Unibody fame, the car

had problems the whole time I owned it. The transmission went twice and I had to rebuild the engine too. I was under the Powertrain agreement so I didn't have to pay anything at all. Ford's people wanted to hide under their desks every time I used to come to the shop. Finally, I sold the car (a Ford Escort) right before I went to Israel in '95.

People get nasty with Ford; saying the name is an acronym for "Fix Or Repair Daily," or "Found On Road Dead." My car was a problem because of me and not because of the brand.

I am glad that with the prices of gas going into orbit, that increasingly fewer people are on the road with their cars everyday. Quite frankly, I wonder just how many of these people managed to get licensed to drive in the first place and it seems that they think they have a license to kill.

I am tired of almost getting killed every time I take a ride with someone and my reflexes are so bad at this time that when I could have renewed my license I didn't. The world can do without one more bad driver.

Did you ever notice that when the road conditions are at their worst, that's when people's driving is at its nadir. I mean, when it rains just slightly, the oil in the tar comes up and the roads are very slick and dangerous. I was taught this in Driver's Ed, years ago and I think most people know it. So, instead of people slowing down and driving carefully, they throw caution to the wind and drive like lunatics. And it's even worse in the snow and around the Christmas holiday season. Let me correct myself here, they don't drive like lunatics. They are lunatics and that is a problem.

I used to live on the corner of an intersection on US Highway 1 in Woodbridge Township in NJ that is so dangerous that two people got killed during the 4 years that I lived there. It has lights in four directions. And I almost got killed too a few times. I almost was run over by a truck one day, and for the life of me, I don't even remember just how I managed not becoming human pancake.

People run the traffic light all the time here and sometimes the light will be red for about 5 seconds or more and they still violate the traffic regulations. I don't know what to do about it.

People seem to think that they can just run you over and they will get away with it because my crossing there was done in a somewhat "non-kosher" fashion. Basically, I would have had to be crossing on the other side of the road to be legal but I have a hard time wrestling with the cars all the time.

People outside of religion, don't seem to understand the concept of Divine justice the way some of the people do. Basically, just like there are earthly courts of law, there is a heavenly court that will even out the scales of justice if need be. The Hindus have this too in their doctrine of karma. Judaism has this idea and Christianity has something parallel to this. When people forsake God, the world suffers.

Last August, I moved about 1/4 mile away from the previous bad junction. I now live right on US Highway 1 and 9 and the roads here are bad too.

People drive in excess of 80 mile an hour on this road and one time, over by my old address, there was a police officer parked next to someone who tried to run the stop sign and the officer banged on the guy's car and yelled, "Hey, where are you going? The light is red!" And there are not enough officers to patrol the junction. Even the law can't stop these nuts. And all the nuts don't grow on the trees. It really isn't funny.

Some years ago, I saw people make a right hand turn from the leftmost part of this highway, to get off the highway and go to another road. They shifted 4 lanes to the right to make their exodus (with apologies to God, Moses, and Cecile B. Demille). It boggles the mind just how dangerous all this is.

These people drive like they are playing a video game like Asteroids Deluxe™. In retrospect, that may actually be some of the problem. They have skills from playing video games that they try to apply to the real world. They really need to come back to Earth.

A few years back, tragedy hit State Sen. Joe F. Vitale (Democrat - 19^th District in NJ) as his 77-year-old mother was killed in a car accident. Horror doesn't respect even well connected politicians and their families. Senator Joe is an elder in my church.

Driving is really a privilege and not a right in my opinion. At least if a person can't obey good roadside etiquette, they should be denied the opportunity to drive a vehicle.

And some people get so aggressive behind the wheel as they have a large piece of machinery to back them up and they lose their inhibitions. Sometimes the driver behind a wheel is like Mr. Hyde when they are like Dr. Jekyll when they are not driving.

It seems to me that new types of training should be used and also new laws need to be written to stop all the abuses. I would like to see the day when the USA becomes a safe place to live.