Driving

Most people don’t give much thought to the mundane subject of driving. This is good, because it helps to support a number of lawyers. On the other hand, many of us have children who expect us to teach them to drive and we need to be careful about this, for obvious reasons: we don’t want the kids to hurt our car — since BMWs cost a bundle to repair —or someone else — since lawyers are target defendants and that’s what negligent entrustment and the family car doctrine were invented for. But there is much misinformation in the world about driving. So, in order to help save your cars and your cash (what? you want to save the kids, too? Well, it takes all kinds) we should briefly review the “true facts,” as some lawyers actually say, about operating an automobile.

Differential Speed

The police and various namby-pamby organizations want you to think that “speed kills.” We encourage juries to think that in order to get money but in our own lives we need to face the truth: Speed does not kill. Crashes kill. Stay out of crashes and you can drive as fast as you want without getting hurt.

But differential speed does kill. Differential speed is the difference (“differential”) between your speed and that of the car, pedestrian, bicycle, bridge abutment, etc. that you crash into, or vice versa. If the car ahead of you is going 114 miles per hour and you are following it at 114 mph then your speed relative to it—i.e., the differential speed—is zero. Everybody is perfectly safe. The only problem comes when the guy in front has a crash, such as when he smashes into a tree, oncoming car, or the aforementioned bridge abutment. Then he suddenly stops, the differential speed suddenly becomes 114 mph., and you suddenly become dead. Except in a few cases, all traffic accidents are caused by differential speed, and that is the key to understanding how to drive.

Lane Discipline

Lane discipline means staying in the lane you should be in until you should be in another. The problem is that people don’t understand what lane they should be in. Here is a quiz: You are driving to work on Broadway during the rush hour; because the car is acting up you are driving 27 mph. You should be in

A: The right lane, so that if you see an accident you can stop quickly to hand out your card;

B: The middle lane, so that if you weave hack and forth a bit as you adjust your hair and makeup
you won’t hit either curb;

C: The left lane, so that you don’t get stuck behind a school bus.

The answer is of course that you have no business being anywhere on Broadway. Why? Differential speed. When everyone is driving 50 or 55 then it’s perfectly safe for you to drive 50 or 55; but at 27 you are a deadly menace as well as a pain in the neck to those of us who need to go 55 because we are running late because we pushed the snooze bar too many times. The lane you should be in is the one in which your differential speed is zero, i.e., in which you and the other cars in the lane are driving at the same speed.

Similarly on the freeway: “Slower Traffic Keep Right.” Federal regulations reserve the right lane for motor home caravans, vehicles with odd numbers of wheels, and cars traveling at Merely The Speed Limit. The left lane is for fast cars, cars with California plates. and women who haven’t looked in the rear-view minor for 47 miles except to do the hair and makeup thing.

Most of the most common driving afflictions result from an imperfect knowledge of differential speed and lane discipline:

Furr’s Effect: Driving slowly in the left lane because of a need to turn left in twenty minutes or so; often afflicts the elderly on their way to the cafeteria for dinner about 5:00 p.m., hence the name. [Named for a Tucson cafeteria.]

Mario Andretti Syndrome: The delusion that going very fast and changing lanes very often will impress people and make them admire you. In many ways the opposite of Furr’s Effect, this occurs in males of all ages but also strikes young blondes that drive fancy cars that you wonder how they paid for them.

Blindness: There remains a cruel and outdated stereotype that this “handicap” adversely affects driving ability; the argument is that one needs to see traffic in order properly to evaluate it. Enlightened studies prove that the blind can drive perfectly well by sense of smell, supplemented when necessary by stopping to feel the street. The Supreme Court will soon prohibit discrimination against the blind in the issuance of drivers licenses.

Alcohol-Induced Death Syndrome: Just as overeating by depressed fat ladies has now been named “binge eating syndrome,” drunk driving has received a more fashionable name. This one may not stick, though, because of a copyright battle over the acronym. Basically, this is Not A Good Thing and often leads to emphatic and final lessons about differential speed and lane discipline.

Bicycles and Pedestrians

The thing to remember about these is that the differential speed is almost never zero and is almost always large enough to splatter them pretty much all over the place. Although this can be useful, the law doesn’t think that it’s necessarily a Good Thing.

Watch out for pedestrians. They do all sorts of dumb and careless things and the cases — notably the recent dart-out decision — make it clear that whatever asinine thing they do is your fault if you happen to be the poor slob in the vicinity.

Bicycles are a complicated subject. The people who ride bicycles realize that because they are healthy, trim, and environmentally-conscious, they are Better Than You and can do basically Whatever The Hell They Want. The idea that bikes must follow automobile traffic rules is an old wives’ tale that hasn’t stood the test of modern Expert Testimony. Legally, your bicyclist is now a sort of hybrid being; he has the legs of a pedestrian, the wheels of a car, and the brains of an avocado. When you encounter a bicycle while driving a car, what you should do is normally obvious. But remember: watch out for witnesses.

Safety Equipment

The government bureaucrats want you to use a lot of safety equipment, and if they want it then it cannot be a very good idea, can it? We have all seen photos demonstrating how one not wearing a seat belt can escape a vehicle in an accident — headfirst through the windshield, for example. If you are strapped in — they strap people into the electric chair, you know — you can be burned. By escaping via the windshield, what’s left of your skull will be untouched by fire and your death will be quick and mostly painless except for that first instant when your brain steps out for a breath of air.

Air bags are fine if you don’t mind driving around with an explosive device two feet in front of you. Keep in mind that if you accidentally set the thing off — by putting the brakes on hard, for example, or running over a puppy, or some other innocent, everyday occurrence — the bag will stun you into unconsciousness, sending the car out of control, and release toxic gases from the inflation mechanism. No, on second thought, don’t keep that in mind.

For some reason people rarely bother to adjust the headrests, which is fine as far as we are concerned since the headrests are there to prevent whiplash. A nice whiplash every once in a while is good for the soul and the pocketbook. You should have a mechanic remove your headrests, in fact; you can see better without them.

Final Thought

Driving isn’t as hard as it seems. The driver’s license test is like the Bar exam: before you took it they told you it was bad but now that you’ve passed it you know a lot of other morons who did, too. And, just like driving, having passed the test to practice law you promptly forgot everything you leaned but they still let you do it. Just remember

The Scrooge Effect: The rule of physics that those who act carelessly in cars do their bit to reduce the excess population.