My personal thought is that the bad driving/tailgating/lane hopping/failure to pay attention is another manifestation of the sense of entitlement we rail against all the time, except on the road, rather than in RE.
Having just returned from a 3000 mile trip in the US southwest, in an F150 wheelchair converted van, I still maintain that SoCal (esp L.A) driving is the worst I’ve ever seen.
Most prevalently seen with expensive cars (Lexus, Mercedes, Bimmers), as
a) what right do I have driving a slow van at all in a freeway (note: the van does 95mph with five people, heavy medical equipment and a wheelchair, as I proved on a particularly empty stretch of the I-15 north of Cedar City, UT)
and b) driving an expensive car means that you have more important business, hence need to get from A to B quicker by any means possible than other drivers.
Every single friend who gets driven down the 405 from LAX to our house in Van Nuys has commented (often from the floor of the car) that L.A driving is the most insane they’ve seen. Even once i’ve explained the rules of the road to them (ie, there aren’t any) they still wonder how we do it without suffering catastrophic firey deaths every day.
Then, I take them out to Page, AZ. and show them the difference. up until then, they are convinced that US cars are not equipped with signals, because they’ve never seen them used in L.A.
Re: new building.
Haven’t been to the Southwest in 4 years, so was suprirsed to see how much new cookie-cutter stuff has been built on the I-40 east of Flagstaff. Even flagstaff itself is bigger. Wonder how many of these new tract homes will sell 60 miles from the nearest big town…
