| Ever have one of those days? You’re going for the 8:30 am ferry, obeying the speed limits, enjoying the promise of sunshine, when you get behind a car that is going 50 kilometres an hour in a 60 kilometre zone. Okay, fine, you think. I’ll pass him in the double lanes on Rat Portage hill.But lo and behold, when you get to the bottom of the hill where the road splits, the other car speeds up to 80 km/hr, the set speed limit. It even increases its speed to 90 km/hr! Passing him would, of course, involve a speed of 100 km or more and you just know this will be your unlucky day and a radar trap will be lying in wait.So you stay behind the other car, figuring that he or she may have finally woken up and is paying attention to the road instead of drinking coffee and gesticulating wildly while talking to his passenger.But no. As the double lanes end, the other car gradually slows, first to the speed limit, then onwards and downwards to 70 km/hr, then 60. This is when expletives start popping out of your mouth like some kind of crazed popcorn machine, “What the bleep do you think you’re doing, you bleeping bleep!!?” You begin to plan out the other possible passing places between Roberts Creek and the ferry. But you just know in your gut that there will be cars coming from the opposite direction in these one or two places and you will be, in a word, screwed.Why do drivers do that? Why do they speed up in the only place where others can pass them who would prefer, unusual as it may seem, to go the speed limit? Slow drivers are just as dangerous as speeding ones because people who have timed their route to the ferry get antsy. And when they get antsy, they do things like tailgating or trying to pass over solid lines. Yes, some slow drivers are not going to the ferry but they know the score. At some time in your life on the Coast, you will be trying to make that window between being in Lanes 10 – 13 or holding on with your fingernails in “possible overload” position.
|
Summer time is the worst. Vacationing drivers swivel their heads about and slow down to view the lovely trees, water and road kill along the highway. You’ve seen these attractions countless times before and you have one goal in mind – the ferry. But, as it happens, you are the lucky Coaster behind the tourist and you are considering the logistics of bunting them along with your front bumper.But it’s not just vacationers who slow traffic, it is people who make their homes on the Sunshine Coast, from Earl’s Cove to Langdale (people from Powell River never slow down as they are trained at an early age to coordinate their two ferries). But Peninsula residents’ heads are somewhere else as they putter along and, inevitably, a line forms behind them that snakes along at an alarmingly slow pace. Do they look in the rear view mirrors and see all the people being held up?! Do they pull over?! Not on your life. Do they speed up?! No! Instead, they seem to be thinking, “Oh, I need to slow from 50 km/hr to 30 in order to take this upcoming corner that I’ve driven through hundreds of times in my life and know that it’s not a 30 km/hr corner”.Of course, we’ll never know what that driver is really thinking. Or, indeed, if he or she is thinking at all. One of us could have faced off with him in the ferry line-up at the end of the drive to find out, but really, who wants an incident when you’re trying to get to Vancouver for a specialist’s appointment that you’ve had set up for twelve months?Just take some deep breaths, turn on some music (something calming like *!@#* This Town”), and dream about the forever-promised but oh so distant four-lane bypass. BTC
|
