Driving according to ‘Suggestions of the Street’

I especially liked the pictures of the signs. My favorite was the yellow, five-sided one shaped like home plate, although I got that answer wrong on the driver’s test because I thought it indicated the location of a baseball field.

But something has happened to the “Rules of the Road.” It seems that they have evolved from being rules to simply becoming suggestions. It’s kind of like when your mom said, “I suggest you eat your Brussels sprouts.” First of all, I don’t know where Brussels is. Secondly, I’m not a scientist, but I do know that a sprout is the vascular endothelial growth proceeding from the seed coat of a plant. Thanks for the suggestion, Mom, but I ain’t putting nothing that is germinating in Brussels into my mouth.

So I chose not to eat my Brussels sprouts. Why? Because it was only a suggestion, not a rule. A rule is like when my dad told me that I could never build any more flamethrowers because they can burn down the garage. From that time onward, “No Flamethrowers” was the rule, and not a suggestion. Of course, that didn’t rule out mini-cannons (See future column titled, “Dad, I Think the Garage Roof Got Hit by a Meteorite”).

But let’s get back to the subject of driving. It would appear that the “Rules of the Road” have become the “Suggestions of the Street.” We no longer have rules, we now have options. There are no laws, there are just guidelines. And the exercising of free choice trumps any concept of courtesy or right of way or safety.

Take, for example, stop signs. In the olden days, “stop” meant that you actually stopped moving. The wheels stood still and the car just sat there motionless. It was kind of like you were, well, stopped.

But nowadays, according to the “Suggestions of the Street,” we really don’t have to stop. We can exercise the option of pausing. We can make the choice to hesitate. We can even dilly-dally if we want. But nothing prevents us from selecting the “No See Cop, No Me Stop” preference.