Exporting Rudeness

I took a short trip to Pennsylvania over the weekend. I was on Route 84 in Connecticut yesterday afternoon when I got stuck in a huge backup due to a crash. Traffic was jammed for 4-5 miles and upwards of 45 minutes while emergency crews cleared a car-truck collision.

We were pretty close to the NY line so almost everyone had NY or Connecticut plates. Everyone was creeping along, patiently inching ahead, looking forward to being out of the mess. There were two lanes of traffic jammed up in the legal travel lanes leaving the breakdown lane open for the emergency vehicles. After about 10-15 minutes a whole fleet of cars suddenly came barreling down the breakdown lane. These weren’t emergency responders; these were private cars ignoring the law and the common rules of politeness that are abided by in the rest of the country. I was surprised to see it because the only place I’d ever seen people do this is in Massachusetts. But this wasn’t lawless Massachusetts, this was polite Connecticut. How could this be?

Well, almost all of these cars were from Massachusetts. I counted 34 cars doing this. Of those cars, 26 had Massachusetts plates. The only Massachusetts plates I saw were blowing down the breakdown lane. And we wonder why people around the country think we’re bad drivers. Not only do we do this in our own state, but, ignorant as we are, we seem to think it’s acceptable to do everywhere else too.

This is one of those uniquely Massachusetts tricks that is virtually unheard of in the rest of the country. If it’s done elsewhere it would be considered the ultimate in rudeness. But here in Massachusetts it’s accepted as OK, at least as long as the cops don’t catch you.