U-turns....yeah, I said it, u-turns

...or "What Happens When No One Suggests a Better Topic".

My friend Michael took me up on a request for blog topics by raling against careless and inconsiderate drivers, how they're on the rise and essentially signalling the end of western civilization. He is especially exercised about the rise in U-turns. I imagined those guys from the original Road Warrior, with blue Mohawks and skulls mounted on the front of their hyper-powered dune buggies, tearing through Coquitlam but getting disoriented on their way to the post-apocalypse and executing in-your-face u-turns on the Lougheed. I mean, Michael seemed a little worked up.

I answered his note with about a half a post's worth of my theories about how our perception of the value of social rules, never mind legal ones, changes over time. When I found myself sliding into a discourse on the outrage that is the misuse of the word "it's", I thought I better rethink this as a post topic. I have precious few readers, I can't afford to carelessly alienate whole swaths of you at one fell post. Besides, there are no movies featuring post-apocalyptic copy editors deliberately flaunting the old rules, daring aged readers like me into combat. I would just look like a crank, not someone with a legitimate movie-based concern about the future of western civilization. (And as an aside, does it still make any sense to refer to "western civilization"?  Isn't it just "civilization" now?)

So, once again, as I do in any situation where I feel a little lost, a little unsure of who I am and where I fit in the big picture, I did what I have done so many times in the past - I decided to Google it. Are u-turns on the rise? Are they ever legal? Is bad driving behaviour in general on the increase, on a per capita basis? Once again, as it has so many times in the past, Google returned a Babel of conflicting and irrelevant information offering no clear answer to my very unclear question (I really have to make a note to myself: stop trying to Google existential questions).

Easier stuff: on u-turns, Section 168 of the BC Motor Vehicle Act, sections A and B, describes when it's not legal to make u-turn. To me the most salient line was 168(b)(iv), which says you can't make a u turn "at an intersection where a traffic control signal has been erected", which includes stop signs, and which means there doesn't have to be a sign that says NO U TURNS for there to be no u turns. This tells me that the vast majority of u-turns I've seen executed in the 35 years I've lived in the Lower Mainland have been straight up, pull 'em out of the car and cuff 'em illegal. There was also a surprisingly offside piece from an old Globe and Mail on when to make or not make u-turns:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commuting/u-turn-or-not-u-turn-that-is-the-question/article4314515/

...but after that, chaos. Well, okay, after that it was clear that getting real answers to those more general questions was going to take more than 30 seconds, so I gave up. I have coffee to drink, I can't be wasting time doing research when I could be just making stuff up. I mean, really, if you're reading this in hopes of finding reference material for your doctoral thesis, you've probably come to the wrong place anyway.

That leaves me apologizing to Michael, who's already had to read it, and copying chunks of my email to him in here. The fun of just ranting about careless drivers and the end of civilization was offset by the very high I'm-just-an-old-fogey-complaining-about-how-man-was-never-meant-to-fly index, so I tried for a more balanced-sounding completely made up theory.

First - there are just more cars on more roads doing more driving, so our chance of witnessing bad behaviour has gone up. Whether that means the per capita rate of foolishness has gone up is questionable. It seems possible, based on some studies I vaguely recall reading about, where they put gentle little bunny rabbits into increasingly crowded conditions and watched them get progressively less gentle and more like, say, rats in horror movies or something (again, let's be clear: movie-based perceptions are only a half step down the Ladder of Credibility from Stuff I Saw on the Internet). It would be great if there was a way to publish some kind of on-the-fly scale for this kind of stress-generated bad driving: "We've just had a caller let us know about a crash in the tunnel, and we're seeing traffic backed for miles on both sides. As a result, on the feeder routes, right now traffic is moving at about 250 a-holes an hour...."

It's a certainty that age makes us intolerant of those who don't put the same emphasis on certain rules that we were taught are very important and which we've run our lives by. My theory is that by virtue of simply surviving this long, we've become foolishly confident that all the little strategies we've used are the reason we've survived this long...which is totally wrong, of course. I mean, just look at all those of us who followed the same rules slavishly and yet did NOT survive. It's that groundless certainty that we're right and everyone who doesn't follow rules we understand is wrong that's the problem. It seems like a long time since I've seen marketing based on the idea that "rules are made to be broken", and maybe that's because the target audience for most marketing is still people like me, who are no longer enamoured of the possibility that chaos is good.

As far as "it's" goes....all I have to do is try and remember that all the rules of language arose from usage. If enough people decide that "it's" can be possessive, it will be. Driving behaviour might not be something that's best settled by consensus and general usage, but recognizing that appetites for change vary might help keep the "old-fogey-etc-etc" thing down. But really, the next time the guy in front of me doesn't have the wit to move up to the stop bar and thus activate the light before we all die of old age waiting for it, I'm going to ram him...