Dear Drivers of Colorado,

My name is Stephen Van Doren. I make software for a living, and drive a motorcycle upwards of 2 hours a day, mostly on the highways. I am 28 years old, and live in Downtown Denver, in the Capitol Hill district, mere blocks from our gold-crowned capitol building. The charming beauty of my existence ceases nearly immediately when I get onto one of our fine, fine highways–I-25 and US36 are both on my route.

Let’s talk, you and me. If people are flashing their lights or honking their horns at you, there is a really good chance that you might want to analyze what is going on. The California principle of “everyone drives poorly except me,” does not apply here. If more than one other motorist has noticed your headlights are off at 10pm, or that you’re cruising down the wrong way on a one-way street, guess what: You are doing something wrong. If you’re confused about just what might be going wrong with your always-flawless driving (mother always loved your driving, didn’t she?), just pull over to the side for a moment. You’ll figure it out. I have faith. If it helps, print out this letter and take it with you. Stow it in your glove compartment, next to the rotted apple and the road map of Montana. Put it inside the never-opened owner’s manual for your car.

Warning: This is a long goddamn post.

Stop Lights

These devices exist to help control the flow of traffic. They’re handy devices, often seen dangling from wires strung between four poles at a four-way intersection, as well as atop those very same poles. They have 3 colors, either arranged from top to bottom or left to right in the following order: Red, Yellow, Green. There. Even if you’re colorblind, you have no excuse.

The red light does not mean, “Take a moment to read some email you received a few moments ago on your PDA.” It does not encourage you to check your hair, or make a phone call, or turn around to rummage through the hamburger wrappers and half-empty, three week-old soda cans to find the not-yet-empty crackpipe you threw back there last night right after you had finished hammering vodka shots and snorting coke off your best friend’s girlfriend’s passed-out sister and saw The Heat (or perhaps it was just a white car with a bike rack) cruising towards you. When that light turns green, there should be no great, sweeping motions, no reorganizations, no adjustments before you push on the gas pedal.

You are allowed to change the station on the radio. Otherwise, leave your hands on the steering wheel. It changes quicker than you think. When you delay, you cause what the professionals refer to as “volume slowing,” and what is commonly referred to as, “that prick in the Subaru who can’t be bothered to stop giving his poodle a blowjob in the passenger’s seat and push the pedal on the right.” All it takes is a couple people doing this at a green light to spin me into a blood rage. There are 660,000 people living in Denver, which is 44mi², and that gives us a pretty dense quantity of people. During the work day, that number doubles. You do the math. People will honk at you, and rightly so. Move it.

Highway Lanes

The highways have more than one lane for the same reason that there exist stop lights: To moderate the flow of traffic. On the highway, you’re allowed to be leisurely, calm, collected, and at ease. In fact, I encourage this. That said, however, if you are in the leftmost lane and intend on a calm, collected, leisurely pace, you are in the wrong lane. If the guy in the right lane is going the same speed as you and there isn’t a huge amount of traffic slowing you down, you’re doing it wrong, even if you’re going the speed limit.

No, it’s not up to you to police the highways and force everyone to go the legal limit. Sorry. We have some fantastic men and women in blue uniforms who take care of this. Meanwhile, there’s a guy behind you whose wife is entering into labor. There’s another guy who, if he doesn’t get to where he’s going soon, is gonna piss all over himself in the car. Another guy is in a cab, being taken to the airport for an emergency. You are fucking everything up. While you’re intentionally slowing traffic, you, my friend, are breaking the law and driving in a very unsafe manner.

Now that you’re in the right lane, there’s something else you need to begin noticing: Turn signals! If someone to your left is signalling, take your goddamn foot off the goddamn gas pedal and let the car in. If you do not, chances are good you’re going to get “cut off.” I know, it’s a natural impulse, when you see someone trying to merge ahead of you, to let your passive-aggressive behavior, nurtured for so many years by unfulfilling love affairs, take over and refuse to let him in front of you. Speed up! The bastard can wait and move in behind me! Muhahaha!

Well, the 99.99% of the people who get cut off are people who refuse to yield. You have to share the road with everyone else out there. If you don’t like it, take the bus. If you can’t handle pubic transportation because of a falsely-inflated sense of elitism, instilled by years of alcohol abuse and a strong addiction to crystal meth, do all of us a favor and jump off the nearest bridge.

Distractions

Yeah, there’s plenty going on while you’re driving that can cause distraction. This is natural. Chief among these, of course, is the accident. Oh, it’s just delightful, isn’t it? Flashing lights, big fancy trucks, screaming, blood, dead people–it’s almost too much to bear! However, unless you’re a paid medical professional, a first responder with expertise in dealing with decapitated dogs and cats, or other such important person who you would like to see first stopping at your accident, keep driving. Rubber-necking not only slows down traffic that is already going to pile up (if for no other reason than there is a car and the bottom half of a heretofore lovely nun blocking half of one particular lane), but causes more accidents. Because while you’re spinning your head around like a doped-up crack whore, the guy in front of you has to stop because of a red light or dead puppy or something, and you’re going to plow into him so hard he’s gonna want you to take him out to dinner first next time.

This goes for all distractions, including sexy people getting tickets from uniformed personnel that you’re imagining in their own porn film, broken down Ford trucks on the side of the road, and (my personal favorite) accidents on the other side of the fucking road. Unless you and your passengers want to join in with the trauma, keep moving!

A slow car can be a distraction, too. In Denver, we’re within a short trip to the mountain roads. They are, more often than not, single lane roads in each direction. If you’re trucking up one, minding your own business, headed to your huge marijuana plantation staffed by Chechnyans who survived a plane crash just up the road a ways, and you look in your rear-view mirror only to see that not only does your Dodge Colt not go more than 30mph up a 6% grade, but you’ve turned a quiet mountain pass into a goddamn Macy’s day parade, pull off to the right side of the road and let everyone pass.

It’s just common courtesy, man.

Snow

Snow as a distraction gets its own heading because we get a lot of it here. For those of you who are new to my city, snow is the frozen water that falls from the sky in these delightful unique “flakes” that you can catch on your tongue. More than that, it’s fucking ice, people. Ice is slick. Ice is cold. Ice can fuck your day up royally. It’s good in tea, though.

“But I have four-wheel drive, Stephen!” I can hear you protest. That’s great, but that just means you can get going quickly–it has absolutely no impact on how quickly you can stop. You stop at roughly the same speed as anyone else stops, which is determined by the weight of your vehicle, the quantity and width of your tread creating friction on the road, the quality of the road itself, and a thousand and one other purely scientific data. Regardless, you should slow down. What did we say about slowing down? If you want to go slower, move to the right lane. Let the people who want to go faster do so, but let them do it in the left lane. That’s what it’s there for.

And please, for the love of all that is holy, if you’re one of the myriad drivers in this city who simply cannot handle driving in the snow, pull over and get a cab or call a friend. Or better yet, don’t go driving at all. Call in sick if you must. But by traveling down a highway at 30mph because you can’t handle the windshield wipers going at such a pace, and the thought of sliding off the road to a fiery death and then icy grave occupies each and every one of your thoughts… You know what you have to do.

Conclusion

Finally, a few small rules that I want you to concentrate on, in no particular order:

• If you must talk on the cell phone, pull over and do so (your phone call, no matter how important to you, is not worth risking my life), or get a headset. If the car is in motion, both your damn hands should be on the steering wheel.
• If you’re having a fight with your bitch of a wife, pull over. Even if you want to end it all because you can’t stand one more morning of waking up next to that cow-faced, doughy woman, please don’t take me with you. I’m on your side: Pull over, release her back into the wild, and go hunt her with a bow and arrow.
• If you just finished a night of binge drinking to end all nights of binge drinking, you have so much alcohol in your system that you tried to light a cigarette and ignited your breath, you’re seeing in triplicate, and the mere thought of even swallowing the spit that is miraculously forming in the mouth your dehydrated husk of a body, call a cab. I don’t care how much fun you had. Me, I spent the night reading Proust to a supermodel who was giving me head every 10 minutes while his twin brother massaged my balls–you don’t see me threatening your life.