Monday through Friday I drive on the Long Island Expressway (LIE) to get to work. It’s a 30 minute commute each way and it is just about all on the Expressway. My office is right off the Expressway service road and my house is about 1/2 mile from the Expressway. So I do a lot of highway driving and I like to just get on the highway, move over to the left lane, and just phase out. The world around me disappears and my mind floats along from thought to thought as I just zoom along the road.

To help this happen, I have developed three rules for driving on the highway that would make my life much easier if everyone would follow.

Rule number 1: If someone is trying to get on the highway, let them in. I hate when people speed up as I am coming along on the entrance ramp. You don’t lose points for being a nice guy so there is no reason to be rude. What I especially hate is when the guy who is trying to keep me from getting on the highway is trying to get off the highway! Since a lot of entrance ramps on the Expressway turn into exit ramps, the situation comes up quite often where I am trying to get on the highway, and someone else is trying to get off. Instead of slowing down and letting me in and slipping in behind me, he tries to force his way in front of me. What I have found is that the best way to get them is to simply not let them in even if that means exiting off the highway. Since the exits simply go to the service road, I can just stay on the service road to the next entrance. But the dope is forced to miss his exit and turn around at the next exit. Ha Ha!

Rule number 2: Unless you are a doctor or a mechanic intending to stop, there is no reason for you to slow down to look at accidents off the side of the road ESPECIALLY when they are on the other side of the road! I hate when this happens and I am, sure you do to… you are speeding along and suddenly there is a big traffic slowdown. You proceed for 15 minutes until you finally see that the problem is that there is an ambulance on the other side of the highway and everyone is slowing down to look. I once say a taxi almost cause an accident because he was so intently looking at the car with the flat tire on the other side of the road that he failed to notice he was veering into the next lane. Stop doing that. Just keep your eyes on the road and your foot on the gas.

Rule number 3: If you are going to drive in the left lane, you can’t drive slower than the traffic in the center lane. That seems so simple a rule but I see it violated every day. A car will be sitting in the left lane driving 50 mph without another car in front of them for a mile but a huge line of cars behind them forcing everyone into the center lane to pass them. And if I am zooming along in the left lane, don’t jump in front of me and then go 20 mph slower than I was going. OK? There is one exception to this rule and it comes with a little story. Once upon a time when my sister lived in Geneva, NY, Michel and I were driving to visit her. We used to go through Pennsylvania and then up through Binghamton. We were in the backwoods of nowhere Pennsylvania and I was in the left lane zooming along and there was a car in the right lane, also zooming along, but going not quite as fast as I was going. Suddenly the other car veered in front of me and hit his brakes forcing me to slow down all the way to the speed limit. While I thought of the appropriate evil thing to say about his parentage, I noticed that he had a radar detector sitting on his dashboard. And sure enough a few seconds later we passed a patrol car sitting along the shoulder of the road. I never found out who that person was, but a big thank you goes out to him!

The picture up above, by the way, is the Long Island Expressway near exit 49, just a short way from my house. The hills in the background are among the tallest hills on Long Island, at about 150 feet.