Shut up and drive

One month into my new job, I’m learning once more what it means to commute.
On the surface, all is rosy, especially when compared to my commute back in DC. To refresh your memory, my office was 14 miles from home. I lived on the south side of Washington, DC; my office was at the northern tip of the diamond. There are no highways through DC, so the options are to drive way out west to the Beltway then north around the city — which would be about 20 miles out of the way and insane — or straight through the city on regular surface roads. In this case, I took the road through Rock Creek Park, which closed to traffic during rush hours, forcing my commute to take place at 9:30am and 3:30pm. (I worked at home a lot.) All told, that off-hour commute took 45 minutes.
Today, I drive 14 miles once again, from north San Jose to the very outskirts of south San Jose. I take two freeways: 880 and 101. I leave the house at about 7:45. It takes me 15 minutes.
The difference in traffic between here and DC is astonishing. People here complain about the traffic, but they don’t understand how bad it could really get.
Yes, there are backups and stop-and-go traffic here. I see it every morning. But here’s the thing: there is still a rush hour here, and there is still “against the traffic.”
Back in DC, those concepts disappeared years ago. There is no longer a period of time called “rush hour,” because the traffic is like that all the time. You rarely hear the traffic reporters use the words “inbound” and “outbound” anymore, because there is no longer a rush into the city, the traffic goes everywhere at all times, so there is no way to drive against the traffic. Weekends in the DC area actually have worse traffic than the weekdays.
Here in the Bay Area, there are plenty of traffic bottlenecks, but there are still rush hours. In the morning and the evening, that’s when the traffic is jammed. But during mid day, on weekends, and at night things are normal. And there are still distinct patterns of traffic direction. The reason my commute is fast is because I am driving south in the morning, against traffic. The north-bound lanes of 101 are jammed with commuters heading north to San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities around the bay.
One thing that is exactly the same is the idiocy of other drivers. Just this morning I looked around, signaled and started to move into the right lane. At the last moment I had to swerve back into the left lane because a woman yakking on a cell phone decided to get into that lane as well. She never signaled, she didn’t even notice that I was already halfway into the lane. She just kept talking on the phone, without a hands-free device — something that is now illegal in California.
Earlier, there was a slow-moving backup, odd on south 101 that time of morning. Finally, I discovered why: there was a slow-moving car in the middle lane. She was doing about 45 miles per hour on the freeway as she applied make-up while driving.
And last week, as I drove in the right lane about to exit, someone was tailgating me and driving halfway on the shoulder, obviously contemplating getting around my slow-moving, 60mph roadster to get to the exit first.
I often feel as if I’m the only person on the road who is actually driving rather than drinking, talking, primping, gesticulating, arguing, watching TV, or eating.