If your horn sounds when you set your alarm, you are an asshole

It's happened twice in the last couple of weeks. After parking my car in a busy parking lot, while walking to my destination, someone sets their car alarm at the very moment when I'm walking past their car. Car horns are meant to be loud. Truck horns are even louder. They are meant to be heard above traffic noise. As you might imagine, I nearly jumped out of my skin both times this happened.

It gets worse. No matter where I happen to live, there are always one or two people who live nearby and, arriving home from work in the middle of the night, blithely set their car alarm, generating at least one, and as many as three horn honks. One honk is bad enough in the otherwise dead silent -- and mostly sleeping -- neighboorhood. I can only imagine that the three honks are just the perpetrator's desire to make absolutely certain that the alarm is set. Like pressing that lit elevator button repeatedly.

There are a few reasons why someone might inflict this kind of annoyance on innocent and unsuspecting people. First, there's the old standby: they just don't give a shit. They may have wondered if the noise might bother people, but they simply don't care enough to do anything about it.

Second, they may find amusement or even joy in the prospect of bothering people. Don't kid yourself; people like this exist. On the Internet, they're called trolls.

But by far the most likely reason is plain ignorance. It seems that people simply don't realize that they can change their car alarm configuration to disable the honking, and instead use an inaudible cue, such as flashing their car's lights, to indicate alarm status. Depending on the manufacturer, there may be other options, such as a much quieter beeping sound.

This is a plea, to all owners of vehicles with alarms:

1. Unless there is a specifc reason not to, please disable the horn honk when you set or disengage your alarm. Hint: there is no valid reason to leave the horn sound enabled. This Google search should get you started: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+alarm+disable+horn

2. DO NOT enable your alarm when you are traveling on a ferry. It's completely pointless, and the motion of the ferry will set off your alarm, repeatedly, over the entire trip. People who are unwilling (or unable) to leave their vehicles during the trip will be serenaded by your idiotic alarm the entire time.

3. Consider disabling your alarm completely. Studies have shown that they are utterly ineffective anyway.

A very bad idea

October 13, 2016, 9:36am, Burnaby, BC. A person with a loaded shopping cart wants to cross all six lanes of Kingsway, busy with the morning rush. Incredibly, someone driving in the center lane ahead of me decides to stop and let the person cross. There's just one problem: nobody else can see what's going on. I notice only at the last moment, soon enough to avoid the person crossing if they had been dumb enough to continue.

Watch the top of the video starting at about 0:08, just beyond the long row of stopped cars in the lane to my right.

(Sorry about the weird camera angle. Someone tilted the camera and I failed to notice earlier.)

In the rear view, I watched as the crosser sensibly retreated. Meanwhile, the cop in the car ahead of me either didn't notice, or didn't care, neither of which makes them look good.



Drivers: please don't stop for pedestrians crossing busy streets unless you know for sure all other drivers can see them.

Communities around the world are experimenting with the seemingly crazy idea of getting rid of road markings. Research has shown that doing this actually makes people drive more cautiously and slowly. And guess what? It's working.

The Guardian has more.

How to adjust your mirrors for complete coverage

It's only a matter of time

... before the tiny woman driving the enormous white Hummer that drove me off the road yesterday kills someone. I was southbound on Fraser Road in Vancouver, and the Hummer was in the left lane, beside me and slightly ahead. Without any warning (like, you know, a signal or something), the Hummer veered into my lane, surprising me enough that the only thing I could do was stamp on the brakes and steer towards the curb. Seeing no reaction at all from the driver of the Hummer, I followed it for a couple of blocks and pulled up beside it. I could barely see the driver's head through the side window. How can she drive that thing without being able to see anything? How did she get a license? I shudder to imagine what it would look like to see her try to park that thing. Anyway, I gave her a big ironic 'thumbs up' and left her to presumably wonder what I meant. Well, she'll figure it out sooner or later when she maims or kills someone.

Worst driver ever

It's been a while since I posted here, but for this, I just had to.

So I'm driving on a highway, limit 90 km/h. Traffic is moderately heavy. I'm in the right lane, doing about 10 k over the limit like everyone else. Suddenly, the car ahead of me applies the brakes. Not hard, but he's definitely slowing. I slow down to avoid  rear-ending him, and I see that the cars ahead of him are also slowing. I figure maybe someone has slowed to pull over and everyone will get back up to speed shortly. But I was wrong.

With cars in the left lane now whizzing past, the right lane comes to a complete stop. I poke my head out of the window, and I can just see a car, about ten cars in front of me, stopped and signalling left. I'm starting to worry now, because stopping on a highway is an extraordinarily bad idea, and I know that it's just a matter of time before someone gets rear-ended and we maybe get a chain reaction pile-up.

I hear the cars between me and the idiot at the front of the right lane honking, and some of them start looking for openings in the left lane traffic to get around this idiot. Cars are building up behind me now too, and some of them are trying to get into the left lane as well, but traffic there is steady. Eventually, there are holes, and people in front of and behind me start filling them.

Of course, those holes are what the idiot at the front was waiting for, because what she really wanted was to make a left turn. She stopped because she didn't want to miss her turn. She didn't pull over. She didn't keep driving until she found a safe place to turn around. No. She stopped dead in the middle of a highway.

Eventually she forced herself into the left lane, and from there into a turning lane, and made her left turn. I was screaming in disbelief and disgust at this point, and so were many of the drivers around me. I witnessed a lot of wild gesticulating as well, and a lot of exaggerated head shaking. And so we all moved on. I waved at the idiot, in a non-friendly way, though I doubt she noticed.

Incredibly, we all emerged from this incident unscathed. I believe that nine times out of ten, this kind of thing would lead to one or more collisions, and possibly serious injury. In a way, I was almost sorry nobody collided, because I would have enjoyed enormously providing excellent testimony in the idiot's dangerous driving trial. This person should not be driving, and I worry that she shares the road with my parents. It's only a matter of time before she causes a serious accident.

Not the worst driver ever, but close

Driving  to work this morning, I came to a crosswalk with a red light, so I stopped.  Most crosswalks here use stop lights that point in two directions along the road being crossed (as opposed to regular stop lights that point in four or more directions).  These lights flash green until a pedestrian presses a button, whereupon they go red for a minute or so.  Drivers must obey these signals exactly as if they were regular stop lights.

I didn't see a pedestrian, which means they probably already crossed before I got there.  Anyway, when I stopped, there was a car stopped opposite me, in the oncoming lane.  This car was signaling for a right turn.  The crosswalk in question is - like so many others - at an intersection of a minor cross street.  Access to the main road from the cross street is controlled by stop signs.  There has always been some ambiguity regarding whether it's okay to turn right at a crosswalk that's currently RED if doing so causes your car to pass through the crosswalk, so I just assumed that the driver wasn't sure and was waiting for the light to go back to flashing green before turning.

As I waited for the light to go back to flashing green, in the car opposite me, the driver looked up from whatever they had been doing, and without waiting for the light to go green, drove straight through the crosswalk - while still signaling for a right turn.  The car behind them pulled forward and stopped, and its driver and I exchanged a puzzled look.

For those of you playing at home: how many mistakes were made by the first driver opposite me, and what were they?