The Roads Are Nearly Empty, and People Are Driving like Idiots
The California Highway Patrol has seen tickets issued for speeds over 100 mph almost double.
With the advent of The Pandemic and its consequent sequestration of the populous, no one is supposed to be out driving. So with great roads and pretty much nobody on them, that means the people who are out there are either diligently visiting the doctor, quickly getting groceries ... or just driving like total idiots. Here in Southern California it seems more of them than usual are driving like idiots.
Now, here’s where I start sounding like a mean old man sitting on the front porch waving his cane at kids and passing dog-walkers. While there are reasonable riders and diligent drivers, yourself included, really, up on my favorite mountain roads, on the freeways and even on city streets, it seems that since the lockdown, there are far more inexperienced, poor-judgment youth with winged pony cars who think they're Tommy Kendall. There are higher than the legal limit of post-teen knuckleheads with Subaru WRX STIs who think they're Petter Solberg. And so many wheelie-poppin’ sport bikers who really and truly believe they're Valentino Freakin’ Rossi and that everybody should therefore get out of their way.
I personally believe you can drive fast on fun roads. Heck, I do it semiregularly. I even lived in Germany for five years and drove on the autobahn every day as fast as whatever press car I had could go, always well over 100 mph. But over there you can trust your fellow drivers. You should be able to trust your fellow drivers here, too. But who am I kidding?
In the last month I have happened upon two of what the kids call “sideshows,” where 100 to 200 of them block off an intersection while a couple cars do donuts as the observers leap out of the way to avoid getting fender-clobbered.
But at least in sideshows you can see what’s happening and avoid it. It’s the otherdangerous dopes who are the real problem.
Up on Highway 39 in the mountains above Azusa, I came around a corner on my motorcycle to find the road blocked by youthful enthusiasts doing donuts. Farther up I witnessed sport bikers roaring back and forth over the same half-mile of road, turning around with scant regard for traffic before roaring back in the other direction. It was Mad Max meets The Fast and the Furious. I was able to anticipate their moves and avoid them, timing my passage to avoid theirs. But there were also families in SUVs and minivans up for the day, wondering what the heck was going on.
Indeed, what?
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I just got off the phone with the California Highway Patrol, which said that the number of speeding tickets they’ve written for drivers exceeding 100 mph has almost doubled since The Pandemic started a month ago. Statewide, from March 19 when the lockdown started to just a couple days ago, they wrote 2,493 tickets for drivers topping a hundred. The same period last year they wrote 1,335 of them. Police across the state have cited an increase in street racing. One guy down in Orange County, as reported in the LA Times, got written up not only for speeding, but for reckless driving and driving without a license after he was clocked going 165 mph on I-5 in a Camaro.
Now, you can handle those speeds because you are a cool professional. But the rest of them don't exactly have good judgment. They’re a little like circus chimps who have been given machine guns.
I first discovered this shortly after The Quarantine took effect. Now, I know what you’re going to say: “What in the High Hades were you doing out there, and just exactly who are you to tell me I can’t drive like an idiot?” You have a good point. Maybe I shouldn’t have been out there (or in this case up there). “But,” I lamely retort, “I have to drive these cars I test on good roads so I can evaluate them accurately for you, the reader. I don’t tailgate or pass dangerously. I do it all safely.” Maybe I should remain in the basement, clacking away on my $19 Amazon-sourced keyboard. But part of reporting is going where there’s news. The news now is that dangerous driving seems to be the norm for way too much of the population.
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And making it safer is a monumental task, according to the California Highway Patrol.
“Statewide, if you can compare it to different agencies, let's say for instance, LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), LAPD has somewhere between 10,000 to 11,000 officers just for the city (of 4 million people). LA County, which encompasses many cities, has maybe 13,000 deputies (for 10 million people). We have about 7,000 officers for the whole state,” said CHP officer Chris Baldonado, public information officer for the CHP. “So if anything, we don't have nearly enough officers, I would think, to keep up with the whole state.”
The population of California is 40 million. Divide it up into three shifts and that’s 17,000 Californians per CHP officer. Baldonado couldn’t statistically link the more open roadways to the increase in tickets, but it seems an obvious connection.
“The rise in the number of citations for speeders over 100 miles an hour isn't because we have more enforcement officers out there. We can't statistically say it's because of the pandemic that's going around. You can make that correlation for yourself. To me, it's safe to assume that because our freeways are wide open, people are taking advantage of that.”
He offered some sound advice that none of the reckless drivers will listen to.
“Take advantage of the fact that you're not going to be late to where you're going now. If you leave at that normal time you can enjoy the nice calm commute, right?”
Right. Now tell that to the hooligans up on Angeles Crest Highway.
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