deeplyshallow // fractional advantage

fractional advantage

I borrowed that particular turn of phrase from a blog I just started reading this week. I am not even going to tell you which blog it was, or who it was written by. Mostly because these are two words very easily paired off, and therefore no citation is needed. So nyah.

The author was writing about Group A flaunting the laws of its existence in order to exact a fractional advantage of time/speed/space/etc. over Group B. It doesn’t matter what Group A or B consist of. It’s the basic concept of fractional advantages — meager but measurable advantage over another party — that I like.

Mostly I just liked the words: fractional advantage.

Got me thinking about all of the ways I exploit situations in order to give myself a fractional advantage over the competition. The most ready example is of course combat driving. Felicia and I differ pretty substantially over this: she is a polite and orderly driver, and I am an aggressive and loophole-exploiting driver. But she still thinks I’m pretty great, and I think she’s really swell, and we get along despite this massive contrast of opinion.

For example: we both take the same route to work every morning. Ours is a two-lane state highway. For a couple of months now we’ve had to endure prolonged construction that tends to whittle traffic down to a single constipated chain. Felicia responds to the large construction lightboard, the one with the arrows indicating the imminent merger of lanes, by promptly merging into the appointed lane, and patiently wading through the flow of traffic to the stoplight that marks the beginning of suburban streets. I, on the other hand, will hold the merging lane for as long as humanly possible, aggressively forcing my way into the merger lane at the last moment. Felicia doesn’t like drivers like me very much. Compare our approaches, however, and drivers like me come out with a slight advantage. We’ll get to the destination, assuming both types of drivers are going to the same place, a bit faster.

This is going to devolve from a conversation about fractional advantages now into a conversation about the rules of the road, and about poorly-educated drivers.

Upon all roadways any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic.

That’s from the U.S. Uniform Vehicle Code. I’d wager that nobody on my commute each morning has bothered to read it. I’ll confess: I haven’t read it, either. But I know and observe this rule religiously — when I’m the slower driver. It’s nearly impossible to follow the rules of the road, since a majority of drivers don’t heed them. It’s not as if this particular rule isn’t universal in this country — it practically is, with nearly all states recognizing it, or a slight variation of it. Do our student drivers receive shoddy training? Is driver’s ed a waste of time? People either don’t know this rule, or they’re deliberately ignorant of it.

Last month — and I’m not sure why I remember this particular episode so clearly, but I do — while driving to work one bright morning, I found myself trapped behind two slow-moving cars. Here’s the stage: it’s a two-lane highway, as I mentioned before. The speed limit is 65mph. I was probably doing 75 or 80mph; I usually am. On the long straightaway ahead, the right (slow) lane was occupied by a pickup truck with landscaping equipment in the bed. The pickup was driving slowly — below the speed limit. The left (fast/passing) lane was occupied by a small hatchback, which matched the slow speed of the pickup to its right.

Before long, of course, I was slowing to match the flow of traffic. I was driving in the fast lane, behind the slower hatchback. Generally I have no qualms about tailgating, but every so often you have an instinct that advises you not to, and in this case I chose not to. I maintained a healthy two-carlength distance between the hatchback and myself — fortuitously, as it turned out, because the driver of the hatchback interpreted that gap as equivalent to tailgating, and brake-checked me. Then he flipped me off. Twice, in case I hadn’t noticed the first time.

Brake-checkers belong in a certain special corner of hell (along with people who swerve around cars that are stopped on suburban streets for legitimate reasons). There’s never, ever a good reason to brake-check. Let’s review the reasons the average driver will brake-check the car behind him/her: they perceive the driver behind them to be driving too aggressively, or following them too closely. The end result is often a split between pissing off the driver behind them, causing them to drive more aggressively, or succeeding in causing a rear-end collision.

Let’s add to the mix that the average — particularly male — American driver seems prone to take it as a personal affront that anybody on the road could possibly be driving faster than him. Hence the brake-checking and the demonstrations of outrage that usually accompany it.

Back to my anecdote: Dude brake-checks me hard enough that the comfortable gap between our cars slims to such a degree that I actually am tailgating him. I drop my speed, because I suspect he’s going to brake-check again. He does. I choose not to respond. Eventually he stomps his gas pedal and swerves violently into the slow lane, at which point I proceed by him, accelerating to my usual 75+. I don’t bother looking at him as I pass, but my peripheral picks up a flurry of motion. More birds being flipped, some flailing of the arms, et cetera. All of this, of course, because he flaunted the most basic rule of the highway: slower drivers stay right.

Nobody likes being the slower driver, apparently.

One of the asides of being an aggressive driver like myself, and also of knowing and observing the rules of the road, is that I defer to people who are more aggressive or drive faster than I. When I see somebody maneuver deftly into a small space between other cars, then drop into another gap, then gun it and wind up a mile ahead of the throng, I’m always a little impressed. I generally do that sort of thing myself, but I don’t often see it executed so well.

A perk of driving a Jeep is the extreme visibility. I rarely drive with my top up, and I often drive with my doors removed. With the top lowered, I have terrific visibility of the traffic surrounding me. With the doors removed, I have no side mirrors — this is illegal, I’m perfectly okay with admitting this — but I still have excellent over-the-shoulder visibility. The great perk of removing the doors/mirrors is that the Jeep becomes insanely slim, and I can weave through extremely tight spaces with ease — I always know precisely how far from walls/cars/eighteen-wheelers I am. I could reach out and touch them if I wanted to.

I drove to Oregon last September to spend a week working on my novel. At one point along the way I got stuck behind a slow driver in the fast lane of a two-lane highway. The slow lane was jammed full of respectful drivers — RVs and semis, mostly. The fast lane was gummed up because of a Volvo whose driver insisted on driving 50mph (five miles per hour slower than the limit, and about twenty-plus slower than most people wanted to drive). The driver of the Volvo was a compulsive brake-checker, to such a degree that I actually did get pretty frustrated. He blocked several passing opportunities that emerged, and refused to switch lanes — as the law dictates quite clearly, I should add. Eventually I was going to pass him in the slow lane, and I did — but I rode the dashed line between lanes and held my speed even with his for a good ten seconds. The distance between his Volvo and the side of my Jeep was less than a foot for most of that time — this is the kicker about visibility and being extremely aware of your vehicle’s size — which, of course, freaked him out, and was less dangerous than the average driver’s response to brake-checking (which is to zoom ahead of the brake-checker and brake-check them yourself). Less dangerous only because of my extreme driving finesse. I matched the Volvo shaky swerve for shaky swerve while he was rattled.

What I’m getting at is that even I, the patron saint of kickass driving, can be a bit of an asshole when I’m pushed.

But none of this takes into account actual emergencies. I don’t brake-check, but let’s say that someone is riding my ass, and I brake-check them. I do this because I’m offended by the idea that they want to go faster than I’m already driving, and how dare they? This is my road. My highway. I’ll set the pace, thanks very much. Now imagine that the driver behind me isn’t being a dick. (For one, assuming that fast or aggressive drivers are assholes is about as statistically accurate as trying to gauge the intended tone of an email. People drive within their respective skill levels. Aggressive and fast drivers tend to be better motor vehicle operators. Not always — but generally speaking.) In any case, let’s imagine that the driver behind me isn’t trying to mark my territory as his. Let’s imagine that he’s driving as fast as he can because his mother just called and told him that his father’s been in a terrible accident, he’s not expected to live, he’s in surgery, etc. Or let’s imagine that the driver’s wife is in labor right now. Do I really want to be the person who brake-checks somebody in that scenario? Maybe the odds of that playing out on the highway are slim, but that’s one other reason I won’t brake-check. Nobody would brake-check an ambulance. But not every emergency is supplemented with sirens.

All of this would be less of an issue if more people just drove respectfully — of me, of you, and of the goddamn rules. People like me can’t get fractional advantages if the rest of the world drives as if they’re setting a universal pace, real world needs and rules be damned.