It feels like there aren’t too many things that everyone agrees on these days – but certain bad driving habits make the list. A few specific driving behaviours can see a driver universally disliked on the road, and can range from the mildly annoying to the downright dangerous.
So without delay, here are the driving styles that seem to produce the most displeasure...
Even when you leave plenty of space in front of your car, following a brake tapper is far from relaxing. You’re always left anticipating the obstacle or traffic they braked to avoid, only to find that it was imaginary. While sensible braking is a good thing and provides a clear signal to drivers behind, incessant braking for no good reason just ensures everyone’s on edge.
Following closely behind the brake tapper (quite literally) is the tailgater. Tailgaters tend to be the schoolyard bullies of adult life, pressuring the car ahead to speed up or get out of the way. While it’s reasonable to expect drivers to stay in the left lane wherever possible, it’s not reasonable to drive right up their tailpipe to make that point. But the most unhinged tailgaters of all might be the ones who sit right behind someone in the left lane of a double-lane highway, when they could simply overtake instead.
The lane hogger and the tailgater are natural enemies, but lane hoggers also manage to irritate most people on the road. Lane hoggers drive slowly in the right lane when they could easily move to the left and allow for easier flow of traffic. Sometimes a driver might be moving to the right to prepare for a right-hand turn or a left lane closure, so this driving habit is arguably less offensive than others. Still – driving too slow in the right lane manages to annoy about 55% of Aussie drivers.
Drivers who refuse to indicate treat everyone around them like mind readers. You might be lucky and see their car drift in their lane so you can anticipate their next move – but more often than not they like to keep you on your toes with a sudden lane shift. Whether it comes down to pure laziness or poor driver training, failure to indicate shows little regard for anyone else on the road.
You pull up to traffic lights and signal for a car to pull out of a parking lot in front of you. They join the traffic and then continue on without a backwards glance or the merest acknowledgement of your hefty benevolence. It’s enough to turn you from a generous saint to an aggrieved grinch in a second. Of course we jest, but in a recent eBay survey a massive 40% of drivers felt annoyed when other drivers didn’t do the 'thank you' gesture after being let into traffic.
You’ve followed someone for what feels like forever going 20km/h under the speed limit, but thankfully there’s an overtaking lane coming up. You move into the right lane to safely pass aaand the driver suddenly chooses that moment to accelerate up to the speed limit. Perhaps this is to do with overtaking lanes being on a straight bit of road more than driver intention – but it never fails to be exasperating.
The last-minute swerver is a true agent of chaos. They usually inhabit the right lane of a freeway or highway until they suddenly realise they MUST take this exit. Cue locked-up brakes and curses all around them as they swerve across multiple lanes across solid white lines. The worst of all last-minute swervers are the ones who do so in front of a heavily-loaded truck, risking not only their safety but also everyone else’s.
More than half of drivers feel vexed by others who don’t park within the lines. It’s easy to see why, when one carelessly parked car can cause a chain reaction of disarray. It just feels selfish when a car is parked over two spaces. Of course, even worse is when someone else’s parking forces you to park out of alignment and then leaves before you do, somehow making YOU look like the jerk in the situation. Being annoying at that scale takes true skill.
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