Whether it’s letting you pass, or cutting you off, William Humnicky has this Perspective on the human element of driving.
I hate the way driving seems to bring out the worst of us. You put an otherwise kind person behind the wheel of an automobile and their empathy seems to fly out the window.
That isn’t always the case. I enjoy slowing down and letting another driver safely merge in ahead of me and always mouth and say “thank you” to drivers that extend the same courtesy to me. But what happens when you remove the driver from the equation?
On a recent Saturday evening, I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown San Francisco. It took about 30 minutes to advance a car length to the driverless taxi which was parked parallel to the curb on my right.
As I inched my car forward, the front of my car eventually overlapped with the rear of the robo-taxi. Suddenly, the driverless car turned on its left turn signal and, in a jerky manner, began pulling away from the curb in front of me. By habit, I looked over at the driver and was ready to signal to the driver that it was OK to pull out ahead of me. I looked. There was no driver. I looked again. There weren’t any passengers either. I started to laugh to myself. I was conflicted. Should I be kind and let this humanless vehicle cut in front of me?