Yeah, the left-lane cruisers make me insane…and I don’t give a rat’s azz if they’re doing the speed limit and feel like, because of that fact, they have no need to get out of the way when someone approaches from behind and wants to pass. It is not their responsibility or duty to enforce the traffic laws---they have no such authority. So get out of the way already. In my book, if you’re in the left lane and not making reasonable progress in passing vehicles in the lane to your right, you need to move over.
To NOT do so creates at least two situations, both of which have the potential to be a big problem. One is that you force people wanting to pass to weave in and out of traffic in ways that makes lots of people uncomfortable, since in doing so one typically (of necessity) minimizes following distances---buffer zones---between cars. Worse, you antagonize people who sometime get so inflamed they end up in near-misses or actual accidents (like the Camaro in the link). Road rage is a truly ugly thing---angry people in turn make the other guy angry and it escalates. Common sense and clear-headed driving go right out the window, often with disastrous results. And if it involves a driver who’s armed, sometimes people even get SHOT in the process. It’s all bad.
That said, I do agree with the sentiment behind the question raised earlier: “Now which is the ‘passing lane’ again?” At some point, in some locations, at some times during the day there becomes a volume of traffic that forces, of necessity, use of the left lane as just another corridor of traffic. Nobody’s pretty much passin’ nobody in those situations---largely vehicles just kind of move as one big mass. But once traffic thins to the point where someone in the left lane can move to the right to allow someone else to pass, they really should do so. Being a dick is just counter-productive. Heck, just mover over long enough to let me pass. THEN you can go back to monopolizing the left lane…til someone else needs to pass you.
