Volunteer to Drive Safely
There seems to be a trend among the people who manage electronic highway signs to try to be clever, but clever in a way that's generally acceptable among Department of Motor Vehicle bureaucrats. So the electronic sign in Nashville said, "In Tennessee volunteer to drive safely." This is a reference to Tennessee's nickname, the Volunteer State, a thing that originated during the War of 1812 when a bunch of Tennesseans volunteered to go fight in the Battle of New Orleans. I've always thought it was kind of dumb.
The thing about this, though, is that Nashville is the last place anybody's going to voluntarily drive in a safe manner. I sometimes make people on the internet mad when I start generalizing about regional driving quirks, but I'm going to do it anyway. Nashville is full of people who like to drive very fast, and they don't pay too much attention to who's in what lane or what the lanes are doing. But I also think they're better at game theory and making logical moves to cut through traffic, because they're not as concerned with keeping other people from going fast as, say, somebody from Chicago. This is what I think of as the traditional Southern driving style, where everybody thinks they're trying out for NASCAR, and they're playing with a new aerodynamics package that emphasizes drafting. They drive like that in Atlanta, too, only there are more traffic jams in Atlanta, so you don't get the full effect. In Nashville, people just drive flat out with the pedal mashed to the floor, and everybody weaves around everybody.
This also happens to be the driving style where I feel the most comfortable, probably because this is closer to the region where I learned to drive. I also drive flat out, at least in a city. It usually works out that Robin's driving when we go through Nashville, but the rain this time meant I was driving. I kept things calm until an interchange about a minute after I took this picture one-handed without looking, but then Nashville got to me, and I started doing fancy weaving that won't work most places, but works just fine in Nashville.
So I did not volunteer to drive safely, but I did have a lot of fun.
Volunteer to Drive Safely
There seems to be a trend among the people who manage electronic highway signs to try to be clever, but clever in a way that's generally acceptable among Department of Motor Vehicle bureaucrats. So the electronic sign in Nashville said, "In Tennessee volunteer to drive safely." This is a reference to Tennessee's nickname, the Volunteer State, a thing that originated during the War of 1812 when a bunch of Tennesseans volunteered to go fight in the Battle of New Orleans. I've always thought it was kind of dumb.
The thing about this, though, is that Nashville is the last place anybody's going to voluntarily drive in a safe manner. I sometimes make people on the internet mad when I start generalizing about regional driving quirks, but I'm going to do it anyway. Nashville is full of people who like to drive very fast, and they don't pay too much attention to who's in what lane or what the lanes are doing. But I also think they're better at game theory and making logical moves to cut through traffic, because they're not as concerned with keeping other people from going fast as, say, somebody from Chicago. This is what I think of as the traditional Southern driving style, where everybody thinks they're trying out for NASCAR, and they're playing with a new aerodynamics package that emphasizes drafting. They drive like that in Atlanta, too, only there are more traffic jams in Atlanta, so you don't get the full effect. In Nashville, people just drive flat out with the pedal mashed to the floor, and everybody weaves around everybody.
This also happens to be the driving style where I feel the most comfortable, probably because this is closer to the region where I learned to drive. I also drive flat out, at least in a city. It usually works out that Robin's driving when we go through Nashville, but the rain this time meant I was driving. I kept things calm until an interchange about a minute after I took this picture one-handed without looking, but then Nashville got to me, and I started doing fancy weaving that won't work most places, but works just fine in Nashville.
So I did not volunteer to drive safely, but I did have a lot of fun.