Detroit is infamous for it's aggressive, fast drivers. Ask anyone who's been here and somewhere else to compare it to. Growing up here, it seems normal to me. But whenever I go anywhere else in the country, I immediately notice how agonizingly slowly everyone drives there.
Notice, I said our drivers are "aggressive" and "fast". I did not say "bad". Bad drivers are what you find in Milwaukee on Saturday mornings. They are amateurs.
Detroit drivers are pros.
Perhaps it's because we've been driving longer than any other city. We got paved roads first. We make cars, so they're like potato chips here. Whatever the reason, be aware and alert at all times if you roll in Motown.
There is a certain hockey-like, rollerball-ish, hyper-active rhythm to the morning drive. You absolutely need to know what you are doing, or you will be eaten alive and spit out on the shoulder.
It looks for all the world like chaos, but there are patterns. And they have nothing to do with anything you learned in driver's ed.
The single most important goal of any driver on these roads is to maintain overall traffic speed. It is THE rule. Anyone who does anything to slow down the flow of traffic will be dealt with harshly and rapidly. You can do anything you want as long as it doesn't break that most important, cardinal rule. Passing on the right, something that would get you thrown in jail in Germany, is fine here. Driving 115 MPH is ok too, I've only seen one police car ever on the Southfield Freeway, and he was in the far right lane looking terrified.
But cut someone off and make them hit the brakes...and you'd better run and hide. Because that shit will get you killed. And rightly so, because you just violated the only rule.
Oh, just to add to the fun, there are obstacles. Lots of obstacles. With Detroit's industrial base, we get trucks of all kinds carrying lots of crazy things, from giant rolls of steel to boxes full of thousands of shiny spiral metal shavings. And I have seen accidents and mishaps involving just about all of them.
I've seen a ladder fall off a truck and immediately get run over by a dozen cars, damaging all of them cruelly.
I've seen the aftermath of a 12-ton roll of sheet steel that fell off a truck and popped open on the freeway like a giant coil spring, nearly cutting an overpass in half and taking the tops off of a couple of cars. It shut down I-75 for three hours.
And the aforementioned metal shavings, when that crate hit the road it looked like a million stars had just been spilled from a galaxy. Beautiful, it their own way. Unfortunately, they were also razor-sharp and several cars lost tires to those stars.
And just today a truck dropped a large paver brick onto the road that missed me by a foot and clobbered the new Edge driving next to me. And a half-mile later, two big cardboard boxes appeared out of nowhere and there was not enough room between them for my car...I hit one hard, sending it flying off into the weeds at high velocity.
But one of my favorite events was the "Rusty 1976 Chrysler Cordoba" incident. A man cruised up the early morning Southfield Freeway, sitting on cracking Corinthian Leather and drinking a hot beverage, his car about 75 feet in front of me and one lane to the right. Suddenly and without warning, the old Chrysler shuddered and ejected the left rear wheel, brakes, half of the differential and drive shaft, leaf spring, and about a hundred rusty bolts and pieces of metal - right onto the road!
His car, immediately unstable traveling at freeway speeds with only three wheels, started spinning rapidly out of control. It must have gone three complete revolutions in front of me, shooting sparks in every direction. Meanwhile, the tire & wheel assembly hit the road and bounced twenty feet into the air, in a parabolic trajectory aimed right at me!
In a split-second, the tire-missile bounced right in front of my rapidly braking car and shot off towards the shoulder, wobbling mid-air like a falling top. Meanwhile, the car had hit the dividing wall hard and was slowing to a screeching stop in front of me. Only the extra-early, pre-rush-hour time of day saved this guy from wiping out ten cars.
I slowed to a crawl as I drove past him. There he sat, motionless, staring off ahead into cloudy confusion, wondering if this was all real. His hands still gripped the steering wheel like a baby baboon hanging on to it's mother's fur for dear life.
Just another day on the freeways of Detroit.
3 comments:
Lucky for him it had "Fine Corinthian Leather" or the outcome could have been different.
You Oakland county guys have it easy. There's no one out there to pick your pockets with traffic tickets. Here in Wayne county there are at least two municipalities that use moving violations to get non-locals to fund public projects. There are cops all over the place, at all hours of the day and night, looking to trap that unsuspecting metro-Detroit driver doing what they do best; breaking the rules of the road. Pssst, stay away from Dearborn Heights and Taylor; you didn't hear that from me.
I drive through all those cities. Off-freeway, I am always careful.
On my 5 minute daily commute I observe the crisp sunny breezes over the pristine sparkling blue ripples of Lake Michigan's Little Traverse Bay surrounded by forested hills of green, fall colors, or perhaps a fresh covering of soft white snow, hardly another car in sight at 7 am. There are mornings when I yearn for the old days of 45 minute drives in the chaos of the Detroit freeways you describe above. Ok, maybe not, but there is something exhilerating about my return visits and having permission to drive like a Detroiter, if just for a day or two!
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