Houston drivers need to chill out

TLDR: Please drive safely 🙏

I spent years in Michigan cursing about how people used to drive there. It felt as if they set out on the roads not with the intention of getting from point A to point B but with a nefarious intention of causing as much trouble on the road as possible.

About a month ago, I moved to Houston. And my fellow Michiganders will be glad to hear that I have forgiven them for all the times they stayed stationary too long at a green light or were doing 60 in the left lane on the highway. Through my encounters on the road with Houstonians, I have discovered a newfound fear of stress, injury and insurance costs.

I have driven through several states and nowhere have I found drivers as aggressive as I have seen in Houston. A series of near death experiences started right from my Uber ride from the airport to my new apartment with a guy in a truck cutting someone off and then deciding to stop in the middle of the highway to flip off his victim. I decided to go on a day trip to Austin and on the way, got a chance to watch a WRX STI weave through two lanes of traffic that was trying to take an exit on I-610, trying its best to brake check everyone that it could. I hope they got a medal for all the time they saved. Just yesterday I had the pleasure of being almost being involved in an accident because someone felt that it was appropriate to turn right from a designated left turn lane.

I get that living in a big city, one as car dependent as Houston, is difficult. But at the end of the day, we are all just tired from work and trying to get back home safely. Let's please cooperate, maintain safe distance from other vehicles, give people a chance to merge into lanes and overall just try to drive safely and non-aggressively. In the Midwest, Texas is seen as having a very "every man for himself" attitude, but I believe that all of us have a shared interest in driving safely. It is frustrating to sit in traffic for 40 minutes just to travel within the city, but I just don't see the additional level of risk taken worth saving a few minutes. I'd like to end my rant with this: Let's say you had to travel 20 miles and instead of going 70, you tried to cut through traffic and went 90. You would save around 228 seconds or 2:48 minutes, which is just 8 seconds short of the length of Jimmy Buffet's Cheeseburger in Paradise. So let us all just put on some music, go a little slowly so that we can all get home safely and stress free.

P.S. I wrote this while I was drunk. If anything I said is incorrect, feel free to point it out in the comments. I will accept your criticism and delete any evidence of this post ever existing because I can never be wrong.