It's good that I'm not a police officer, especially in traffic control. On a cop's salary I don't think that there's any way I could afford all the bullets I'd fire out of sheer frustration every day. I wouldn't shoot people, because as Dick Nixon said, "that would be wrong." But I'd have to kill twenty or thirty nitwits' cars dead every day.

I don't blame the problems on the lack of traffic enforcement, because there is no such thing as enough traffic enforcement. Any township, county or city has to recognize the fact that there can't be an officer on every road and at every intersection all the time. Perhaps I am being pessimistic about this, but it seems like a sense of entitlement and a breakdown of civility has led to this mess in my suburban Philadelphia enclave.

I guess that overpopulation should not be ruled out either. Get enough traffic on the road and soccer moms and corporate lawyers will start driving like gangbangers in a stolen Escalade. A sense of frustration or desperation may cause a driver to cut corners or push in front of other folks without regard to the consequences. This explanation still lacks credibility to me, though.

I think it's more likely simply that people have decided that their needs come first, before other drivers and before the rules of the road (and sadly, before common sense in many cases). Watching a driver making a left turn force his way into the stream of traffic suggests to me that the person behind the wheel does not think that what s/he is doing is wrong, it is simply fulfilling ones personhood or asserting ones presence or some such. And I think that our kids are going to grow up increasingly thinking that ones limits are established not by social contract and not by regulation, but simply by what one can get away with.

In the meantime I think I'm going to invest in an airhorn. A loud one.