I drive a lot. I like driving. I’ve done enough of it in enough places to know what good driving looks like. And I’ll just say it plainly: Bay Area driving is bad.

Not because everyone here is awful. Plenty of people are perfectly fine drivers. The problem is the spread. On the same stretch of road, you can have one person driving like a cautious adult, one person drifting around like they’re still processing what a lane is, and one person cutting across a gore point because their exit apparently came to them in a vision. And of course, there’s the lunatic who thinks too highly of their car and their own reflexes, weaving through traffic like it’s a video game.

That mix is what makes Bay Area driving exhausting.

The roads themselves do not help. Potholes, faded lane markings, random dark stretches where street lighting seems optional.

But the roads aren’t the real problem. The real problem is who else is on them.

A rough field guide

There are basically two kinds of bad drivers. The ones who don’t know how, and the ones who do but choose not to.

The first group splits into the incompetent and the inexperienced.

The incompetent are the genuinely alarming ones. They make moves that suggest they do not understand spacing, speed, right-of-way, or sometimes basic geometry. The inexperienced are different. They are not good yet, but they are often at least trying. They hesitate, brake awkwardly, miss chances, and generally move through traffic with the energy of someone taking a final exam they did not study for. That can still be annoying, but it is usually more forgivable and more predictable.

The second group splits into the reckless and the assholes.

The reckless are overconfident and impatient. They weave, tailgate, dive into tiny gaps, and act like every commute is a qualifying lap. The assholes are a little different. They may be competent enough behind the wheel, but they the road like a status contest. You signal, they speed up. You leave space, they take it. You make a reasonable merge, they act like you’ve personally insulted their bloodline.

And then, thankfully, there are the good drivers. Competent, aware, patient, predictable. The ones who know how to keep traffic moving without turning every lane change into a hostage situation.

Everybody starts in the incompetent bucket, because everybody sucks at driving on day one. Most people put in enough miles to graduate into inexperienced-but-safe, and from there they drift toward either the good column or the bad one. Most of us live somewhere in the middle, nobody’s a saint, and even a mostly-good driver will occasionally do something boneheaded.We’re human.

What bothers me

Here’s the part that actually bothers me: good drivers get punished for being good.

Leave a safe following distance. Someone cuts into it.

Signal early before a lane change. The guy next to you takes it as a cue to close the gap.

Try not to pass on the right. The guy camping in the left lane thinks doing 5 over the limit buys him a permanent lease.

The reckless drivers are basically extracting value from everyone who’s trying to play nice. It’s a tiny, stupid version of the paradox of tolerance.

The twist is, in order to stay safe, good drivers end up doing things that in a saner world only the jerks would have to do. They stop leaving a cushion. They signal late on purpose, so nobody has time to close the gap. They pass on the right. None of them actually want to drive like that. They do it because the alternative is getting cut off, getting boxed out of every merge, or getting stuck behind a slowpoke forever. That is not them turning into bad drivers. That’s them adapting. And it’s a vicious cycle, because every good driver who starts driving a little less nicely makes the road feel a little more hostile to the next good driver.

What to do out there

STAY RIGHT UNLESS YOU ARE PASSING. If there is an open lane to your right, you should be in it. The only real exceptions: you are about to turn left soon, or slower traffic is merging in from the right. Otherwise, if you are sitting in the left lane with an open lane to your right, you are making the road worse for everyone else, and you are part of the problem.

Let others in when it is safe. If all it takes is easing off the gas to make room for somebody who actually signaled, do it. If traffic has already stopped and a car is trying to merge in, let them in. Almost zero cost to you. Pay it forward.

Know and follow the right-of-way. Please. FFS. It really isn’t that hard.

Don’t ever make somebody else slam on their brakes. If your maneuver requires another driver to stomp the pedal, it’s not a good move. This should be obvious. It is somehow not obvious enough.

Turn off your high beams. Modern headlights are already bright enough to interrogate a prisoner. You don’t need the high beams on top of that to nuke your retinas. I used to flash mine back as a gentle reminder. Turns out most people either don’t know what that means or don’t care. I’m seriously tempted to rig up a mirror setup and bounce the light right back at them.