Speeding
Driving fast is not usually about getting there faster. Figure that on a sixty mile trip (say from Boston, MA to Portsmouth NH), every extra five miles per hour is going to save you about five minutes. If your life is scheduled so rigidly that you feel justified in breaking the law to arrive in New Hampshire five to fifteen minutes before you otherwise would have, you might want to talk to somebody about that. Now if you have the nerve to drive 30 miles over the speed limit, yes I suppose you’ll save a significant amount of time with the speeding, but with regard to risk versus reward, the risk associated with driving 30mph over the speed limit (on most occasions) does not off set the reward for arriving in New Hampshire 30 minutes earlier (for more on this see chapter X “how fast can I go). So why do they speed? People speed because it is part of who they are. At the core, there is something that makes them want to go faster than what is allowed. So the root of the speeding phenomenon is personality and the result is faster driving. But not all speeders are not created equal. To classify people as simply “speeders” would be like calling everything in your closet “clothes”. Yes they are clothes, but pants don’t look anything like shirts, and even within those categories you have jeans and slacks, t-shirts and button downs. Calling all the items in your closet “clothes” is a vast oversimplification. As such, the classification of speeders can be further broken down as well. There are four types of people who speed habitually; the antagonistic, the perpetually exhilarated, the efficiency obsessed, and social deviants. A valid metric for severity of each of these personalities, is miles per hour.
The Antagonistic
This is the guy who passes you for the sake of passing you. He sees the highway as another chance to compete and to win. How fast he goes is a result of how competitive he is and how fast traffic is moving. If traffic were moving along at a steady clip of 110 miles per hour, he’d be driving 115. He was probably a high school athlete and works in sales. He has a clean hair cut and wears those sunglasses that he thinks make him look like a pilot. There is not usually anyone in his passenger seat, and if you can hear the radio, its top 40. His friends have shortened his name to some nickname of a nickname like “D” or “Biz” (short for “Doug” and “Bran” respectively). If he has facial hair (most of the do not) it is in the form of a moustache. Popular bumper stickers for this type of car are anything NASCAR, anything political, and anything being peed on by Calvin (the notable exception here would be a sticker portraying Calvin peeing on Hobbs, in which case the speeder may fit more squarely into the “Social Deviant Speeder” category outlined below). Sometimes as he passes he looks at you like a boxer stands over their knock out victim. He loves that he’s passed you, for that instant he is a winner. But it doesn’t last long- since he’s got a whole line of cars to pass. His self esteem is somehow related to how fast you have decided to drive that day, very sad.
The Perpetually Exhilarated
This guy is so hopped up on being alive that he’s barely aware he’s passing you. If he stops to consider you at all, he calls you a sheep and feels a deep sense of pity in his soul for you since, judging by your rate of travel, are not as vehement a liver as he. You must be missing something. Leaving your house in the suburbs, with your aging beauty of a wife (who you have known since high school), and saying good bye to your 2.3 kids, to work in a cubicle, for some faceless corporation which gives you two weeks of vacation so you can go to Disney World in July. But enough about you, this paragraph is about him. He’s going fast because he does everything fast. He doesn’t really need to be anywhere fast, he simply needs to be going there faster and when he arrives he’ll do whatever activity he came to do faster too. He gets a little rush from driving faster than allowed by law, but the law isn’t really the point, the act of going fast is the point. Unlike the antagonistic (who speeds because he wants to go faster than you), or the Social Deviant (who speeds because someone told him not to), his speed has nothing to do with anyone except himself. That is, speeding for him is an intrinsic reaction to being in a car. At the extreme he is an adrenaline junky, although you can certainly fit into this category even if you’re not an ex-navy seal. He enjoys his food with all the gusto of an Italian mob boss, he has a romantic partner half his age, he only sleeps for about five hours a night, and has above average intelligence which he probably doesn’t use for anything other than trying to convince his friends that music from a record sounds better than music from a CD. Sometimes he has long hair, sometimes his head is shaved bald; the point being he likes extremes. His car windows are either open or closed; no half way up or down. He has either no bumper stickers, or he has more than five, all of them slogans with the advice he thinks you need (for more on this see the chapter X “bumper stickers, your car’s tattoo”). He could be a smoker, but probably not. If he smokes, he smokes full flavor (as opposed to “light”) cigarettes and goes through a minimum of two packs a day. If he goes to the gym, he’s a power lifter. If he runs, it’s a marathon or the 100 yard dash. He loves the outdoors and travels whenever he can to some god forsaken place that probably doesn’t even need to be on a map. Hey guy, if that place is so great, how come I’ve never heard of it? I don’t worry about offending him, because he’s probably reading this book too fast to get any real meaning out of it.
The Efficiency Obsessed
This person looks at the first paragraph in this chapter and says, what do you mean five minutes isn’t important? Rate times distance equals time. Time is money. Lost time is never found. If you happen to be driving a truck or an SUV and can see into his car, you’ll notice it is clean and neat. He probably has his CDs in one of those handy visor sleeves, a cup holder that’s just the right size for his stainless steel travel mug, and a little plastic trash bag hanging from the back of the passenger seat. If you could get your nose close enough as he drives by, all you’ll smell is clean. His radio is tuned to talk radio, or maybe he has a book on CD about self improvement, after all, he needs to make the most of his time spent in the car. He works in middle management, but someday he hopes to become an upper middle manager. His speed is deliberate, he knows how fast he can safely travel without risking a ticket and will get to his destination just that much faster, whether he needs to or not. Maybe I was too nice here, since this is the category I most “neatly” fit in.
The Social Deviant
The car of choice for social deviants is the Nissan Maxima (black with leather interior). Don’t ask why, it just is. If I were the police commissioner, I’d make it policy to pull over every Black Nissan Maxima on the road and search the trunk. We’d have a lot less crime in our fair city. I know what you’re thinking, and no you couldn’t just make a policy against owning a Black Nissan Maxima. That wouldn’t help; because you see, these delinquents are a slippery bunch. Take away the Maxima and they’d soon find a replacement (maybe the Pontiac Grand AM, or possibly even a late model Chevy Impala). When the Black Nissan Maxima passes you, he does so with total disregard for the legally enforceable institutional contract which is our speed limit. He’s going fast because we all got together and asked him not to. Maybe he didn’t get enough hugs as a child, or perhaps some young lover broke his heart. Whatever the reason, he’s decided he no longer wants to play by the rules of organized government. He shuns convention and takes personal offense to the posted speed signs. If there were a minimum speed limit to be enforced, he’d be driving below it. But such is not our current reality so he drives like a bat out of hell to get to some crappy (by which I mean not Starbucks) coffee shop. As he speeds by he’s not passing you, he’s passing everyone in the whole country. He may or may not have a sticker on his window that says “Your College Sucks”, and god help the Efficiency Obsessed person who has to ride in his passenger seat, for although they’d be comfortable with the rate of travel, they’d find their brown leather Cole Haans surrounded (or covered in depending on the depths of his drivers perversion) by candy wrappers, soda cans and styrofoam cups. He smokes, and this is good because otherwise his car would smell like McDonalds.
So there you have it. Speeding has nothing to do with getting there faster, it is an expression of a person’s inherent personality defects. So take a look into the car passing you and try to decide whether you are being passed because the driver’s self esteem is at stake, or if they just have to pass because life is too short to drive like you, or is they are on their way to reconcile a dispute between the scheduling committee and the finance group, or if they just plain hate you. People speed not because they have places to go, but because they embrace mental frailty. So don’t take it personally, stay the course, and beware the Black Nissan Maxima.
