If you look carefully, you’ll see that the light is red. There are two cars stopped ahead of me. And then there is this car just to my right, twenty-five feet from the intersection. As we wait, she doesn’t inch forward until the light turns to green. “Uh-oh,” I think to myself. I’ll bet she’s going to try to merge in my lane when we start moving.
But she doesn’t. I leave room, but she makes no move. I watch carefully, but she keeps going straight, even after I turn left at another light about a thousand feet ahead.
So, as I often do, I wonder, “What is going on here?”
- Maybe she’s a super cautious driver. She wants to keep a safe distance from the intersection in case someone is crossing the street. Don’t you hate it when you have to walk around a car sticking it’s nose into the crosswalk?
- She doesn’t want to tailgate. We all hate tailgaters, don’t we? Oh, wait, there’s no one ahead of her.
- The obvious: she’s on the phone. Maybe she’s been on the phone, and still doesn’t notice that the people ahead of her drove away when the light turned green. Oblivious, she’s waiting through another cycle.
- Did her car stall out? She could have been calling AAA at that moment. Cars break down in the worst possible situations, right?
- Maybe she knows the people in the SUV ahead of me and was talking to them. The light is red, so she can’t go anywhere anyway.
- She could be hallucinating. Maybe she sees two cars in front of her that no one else can see. Hmm.
- Invisible cars ahead of her? The car’s automatic braking sensors knows there there. Stopped that car on a dime.
- I’ve eaten in the car before. I remember driving a stick shift on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, tossing a token for the toll, and eating a cup of blueberry yogurt on my way to a class a Rutgers. Maybe she doesn’t multitask well, and a snack distracted her.
- Was she lost? Was she trying to get Google Maps to give her directions?
- One more. It’s an malfunctioning autonomous car. There ‘s a bug in the software, so there she sits.
I never know what I’m going to see on the road.
Waite for it... 