Oh boy. Just had this conversation today.
First, a bit about where I'm coming from:
I learned to drive in Germany, which means I had to go through their driver education and pass a test that would make the vast majority of US drivers weep. Since then, I've driven in almost every major city and tons of smaller ones in the US and Canada, as well as various places in Europe, the middle east, and Africa. I've driven for a living more than once, and have clocked probably close to 10 million miles behind the wheel.
So I'm going to be writing with some larger perspective here.
In all of the places I have driven, I never once encountered road rage until I moved to Eugene. Not other people's road rage, mine. Oregon in general isn't terrible in the grand scheme of things, but Eugene has somehow managed to distill the essence of shitty Oregon driving and pipe it into the water system. My. God.
Just so those of you who aren't accustomed to venturing past the county line understand, here's a good example: in literally every other part of the world where I have driven, the speed limit is well understood to be a minimum acceptable speed in most cases. On the highway, tradition holds that most people will drive 5-10 MPH (or KPH, for some reason metric places get less actual leeway) over that limit. On surface roads, that usually stays closer to the 5 end of the range. That's what everybody does. Everybody.
In Eugene, the speed limit is strictly interpreted to be the reckless and irresponsible maximum velocity that a driver can realistically be able to cope with. It's almost like they looked at the pedals and said to themselves, "well, they made the one on the left a lot bigger, so that's the one I should pay attention to. That other one just looks suspicious and kind of complicated."
So those crazy foreign drivers from exotic places like Stockton aren't really that crazy. (Well, maybe Stockton wasn't the best example) It's that they're trying to apply the rules that work everywhere else that has managed to pave roads.
And now everybody's freaking out. The local people aren't used to seeing things move faster than a parade float, so there's all this blurry stuff happening where the cars go. And the non-local people are wondering if maybe they need to see a doctor about their perception that the whole world is in slow motion.
And that's one example. There's plenty of others, including dangerous courtesy, forbidden passing of garbage trucks, coming to a screeching full stop in front of a sign that says, "Right turn permitted without stopping," even though the right turn signal has been on for 300 yards and sure enough you turned right, and the always-delightful I-Just-Shit-My-Pants freeway merge.
This isn't curable, you know. It isn't going to get better. Read on through the thread and you'll see defiant rebuttal after defiant rebuttal from locals quoting statutes and claiming that they're doing nothing wrong because they're doing EXACTLY what the rules say.
It's wonderfully comforting, taking solace from knowing you're right and have the law to back you up. It requires no thought, no self-awareness, nothing more than doing what you're told.
But stubborn adherence to dogma in the face of reality is almost always ridiculed as regressive and wrong-headed by those not in the club. This being Eugene, I suspect some of those quoting statutes have at one point looked down on those similarly quoting scripture to justify some behavior or belief that was at odds with all available evidence. It. Is. Exactly. The. Same. The rules are telling you one thing, the rest of the world is telling you something different, but you're right. OK then.
Oh, and before you drop too much hate on yet another out-of-stater, I'm a native. 7th generation Oregonian, actually. And Eugene is a beautiful place to live. But come on, people. Go to Boston and rent a car. Or Chicago, Miami, LA, Dallas, Detroit, Paris, Frankfurt, or freakin' Soddy Daisy Tennessee. Everything will seem chaotic and fast, even though they have almost exactly the same rules you do. And try to understand that the chaotic and fast you're seeing is normal for them. And while everybody bitches about traffic everywhere else, a driver from Chicago wouldn't have a hard time dealing with Boston. The hardest part would be dealing with regional differences in traffic engineering. But the guy from Chicago wouldn't be freaking out about Boston being crazy and chaotic, and probably wouldn't draw any attention from other drivers for being way out of line with everybody else. That's because there's a pretty uniform standard of driving behavior that isn't dictated by the stuff in the driver's manual. It's a social arrangement that functions extremely well.
So have fun, and drive safely. And please remember that just because you're a hypermiling enthusiast doesn't mean that the 25 cars lined up behind you are just as committed to the cause.