An alarming proportion of drivers are complete idiots. I know this isn’t news to anybody, but it’s still occasionally amazing.

Today on the way to work I was approaching a toll plaza. This plaza comes fairly soon after a major entrance ramp, so people who enter the turnpike at that entrance have to cross multiple lanes quickly if they want to make it over to the high-speed tolltag lanes. This morning some goon cut across about four lanes, just in front of the toll plaza. *sigh*.

Cutting across multiple lanes isn’t ever a really bright idea. But this was worse for several reasons:

• Traffic was heavy
• The lanes were moving at different speeds … most of them were full of people slowing down to drop coins in the toll baskets or to get change from a real live human, but the lanes she was aiming for were heading full-speed through the tolltag lanes
• There was no room for error. We were all traveling pretty fast, with only about 25 feet left before the concrete pylons that divide the lanes of the toll plaza.

All that to save probably 20 seconds or less.