Veer left guy. I hate veer left guy. Let me tell you about him.
I've heard most of you agree the left lane is for passing and I agree - when you're in the country or between cities and there's more road than cars and they're several hundred yards apart and you come up behind another car every few minutes or so... but in a big city that philosophy is just not practical. In Austin (Houston, San Antonio, Corpus, El Paso, Dallas, Fort Worth, etc.) all lanes are bumper to bumper all of the time.
I drive 25 miles down 183 every day from the LCP to Ea'side and back again. I do it in the left lane but I don't impede traffic. I go as fast as I can. On the toll roads north of Austin that can mean 85 or 90 mph between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. Or it can mean spending more time sitting at a standstill than scooting up a few feet on the way back home in the afternoons.
When traffic varies from 50 to 60 to a dead stop at various intervals throughout the commute, veer left guy tailgates like a mofo and tries to go about 5 miles faster than the car in front of him. When traffic inevitably screeches to a halt, veer left guy seems surprised. It's already happened to him 13 times on this commute and hundreds of times this week, but dang it, he never expected it this time so he's unprepared, he didn't leave enough space, but that's okay, he just veers left into the little shoulder next to the wall.
I've been driving for 40 years and Austin has had bad stop and go traffic for all of those 40 years but we never had veer left guys until the last several (maybe 10 or 15 years). Is this what they teach people now? Has Austin been besieged with domestic immigration from the land of veer lefters? Is this what they've always done in some place like LA or Boston or Philadelphia?
Have people just noticed other veer lefters and thought, Hey! I want to be a veer lefter too.
All I know is that I still try to keep that perfect distance from the car in front of me that discourages people from cutting in front of me but still enables me to stop on a dime before I hit the car in front of me when the car in front of me comes to one of its 30 inevitable complete stops on the highway.
But up ahead and behind, I see about 40% of the cars veering into the left shoulder, like OMG, you can't expect me to stop that quickly, I'm taking an escape route.
And when such a large percentage of cars take the same escape route, the escape route becomes almost as densely congested as the lane of traffic, thus obstructing the extra stopping space veer left guy imagines he has.
This morning - and keep in mind it was still dark so all I saw were headlights - I had a veer left guy in front of me and a veer left guy behind me.
And it's always kind of creepy to follow a veer left guy because you always have to wonder if he's simply a veer left guy or if he's actually swerving left to avoid some terrible obstruction on the road, like a couch that fell off the back of a truck or a dead body.
I hate veer left guy. He's a consummate wuss.