I briefly mentioned south Florida’s drivers in the previous post, but this comment elicited further thoughts:
I’ve driven in southern Florida, and I’m quite surprised to learn they actually have traffic laws. Judging from the near-random maneuvers of the locals, I’ll bet they’d be surprised too. It’s one thing if you’re a farmer stopping in the middle of a country road to chat with your neighbor coming the other way; it’s quite another to do it in Coral Gables in the middle of the afternoon.
I praised Florida’s laws, not their enforcement, or Florida’s drivers. In addition to the complaint here, I’d point out their inability to merge on a freeway, and to find the little stalk on the steering column called a “turn signal.” Or once having found it, to turn it off.
There are (at least) three types of lousy drivers in south Florida, which has the worst drivers, overall, that I’ve experienced in the continental United States. The place that it reminds me of the most is Puerto Rico (though fortunately, it’s not quite that bad). As far as his first complaint, that seems to be right out of San Juan, though I suspect that it might be a Caribbean thing in general.
That said, the three groups are:
- Cubans
- Haitians
- Chronologically-Challenged New Yorkers
The first group is similar to Puerto Ricans in their willingness to just pull over and gab if they see someone they know on the road, even on a freeway (though, again, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as in PR). Not, of course, to imply that there aren’t a lot of borriquenos here as well.
The second are similarly Caribbeans, but have even less experience with cars, coming from the poorest nation in the hemisphere (our own little bit of Africa). On the other hand, most of the dark-complected folks here are Haitian-Americans, rather than “African-Americans” (at least in south Palm Beach County) and great folks (when they’re not behind the wheel), because they’re grateful to be here and out of the hellhole that is their little bit of Africa, and haven’t been here long enough to have absorbed the grievance culture of blacks who were born here, and are still resentful of wrongs done to them decades or centuries ago, fueled by the grievance industry exemplified by the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world. One can always tell them by their unique French dialect. So let me make that a fifth thing* that is better about south Florida than southern California.
The third are people who shouldn’t be driving because they’ve been doing it too long. That is to say, the codgers of both sexes and all genders, of whom there are many down here, in “God’s waiting room.” They’re not only old drivers, but they’re people who never drove well to begin with, because they spent much of their lives in one of the five boroughs of New York (this is the sixth, most southern one), and rarely drove, and when they did, didn’t have to deal with the kinds of driving and freeways that we do here. On top of that, they have a preference for large cars, over the dashboard of which many of them are too short to see. There have been many essays written on this subject, and I shall say no more. I think you can imagine the situation, based on the information already provided.
* OK, for those who want the whole list:
- thunderstorms
- warm ocean temps for diving
- no state income tax
- more rational traffic laws
- Haitians, except for their driving skills