Road Devils

Drove back to KL last night from Ipoh, which effectively was our last leg of the round Malaysia road trip for the Chinese New Year holidays. Yesterday was supposed to be a working day, but knowing how horrifying traffic on the highway could get on the last day of the holiday with KL citizens all heading back towards the city, I had already planned leave for yesterday. Traffic was still quite heavy though. Obviously quite a number of people had the same idea as I did. But still it was manageable. I managed to arrive home in just over 2 hours, with only a minor delay occuring in the stretch between Rawang and Sungai Buloh.

If there's one thing that I hate about driving on the highways in the holiday season, it is the driving habits of some selfish and inconsiderate drivers, terrorising the road as though the road was some racing circuit owned by their grandfathers. Traffic on the highway could sometimes slow down to a snail's pace during the festive seasons, and it is understandable to get exasperated at the pace when you could only manage to cover a distance of about 20km in a space of an hour, but please remember if you feel that way, EVERYONE else is feeling the same.

Some impatient drivers resort to speeding on the emergency lane, and cutting the traffic left and right just to gain what, possibly 10 minutes less on their journeys? And risking the lives of their loved ones and other innocent road users by driving dangerously? To be brutally truthful about it, I really don't give a damn if such selfish drivers were to end up under a trailer or in a deep ravine due to their thoughtless acts on the road, but it is such a pity when it ends involving their passengers and other road users.

It never fails to irk me when a driver cuts into my lane, squeezing into the space between my car and the car ahead of me, the space which I had adjudged to be a safe cruising distance when traffic is heavy but moving smoothly. All because the driver could not wait and resort to swerving left and right into any space they feel they could squeeze in to gain any measly minutes of their journey time. There was an instant when 2 cars actually squeezed into the space ahead of mine, apparently racing to get back into the fast lane after overtaking on the slower lane. There was just enough space for one car ahead of me, and when the second car just barged into my lane, almost hitting the front of my car in doing so, I had to hit the brakes rather suddenly to avoid bumping into its rear. A surge of expletives almost came out of me, and how I wished I was driving a trailer so that I could just mow down this imbecile driver. Lucky I was under a censored mode (wife and daughter were in the car), and was driving a mini MPV, or the worse could have happened.

As we reached Sungai Buloh, there was a blue Lancer Evo doing its zig zagging trick across the 3 lane highway, speeding its way pass and having little regard for the other vehicles on the road. A bus only just managed to avoid ramming into its rear as the Evo swerved from the middle lane into the slow lane with a perceived thoughtless non-chalance. "Crazy!", I thought to myself. My wife made a non-approving remark too. "Maybe he felt he's lived too long".

A few minutes later, just a few kilometres away from where the Evo overtook us, we noticed the traffic stopped almost abruptly. I had to switch lanes almost instantly to avoid the stationary cars on the middle and fast lanes ahead of me. A speedtrap maybe? Then just a few lengths ahead, I noticed a car that had spun out of control and ending up into the road divider in the middle of the road, obstructing traffic on the fast lane.

It was the same blue Lancer Evo.

Lucky the oncoming cars managed to slow down and avoided a further terrible mishap that could have involved so many other people. The Evo must have spun around across the 3 lane highways, its rear ending up ramming the divider. Looked like everyone in the car was ok, the serious damage limited to the rear of the car, and maybe to the driver's ego. It was a relief to see no one got hurt. But at the same time, it gave an inexplicable pleasure to see the stupid Evo driver ended up that way. Haha..!

Let that be a lesson to that devil.