Get poor drivers off of our freeways

It’s been days and the old newspaper has long since hit the recycle bin, but I’m still pondering what I saw regarding proper driving etiquette per the Washington State Patrol (“A drive for civility,” Nov. 4).

Did I not see a diagram which showed four traffic lanes and an HOV lane? Try as I may I can think of no such an arrangement on any of the stretches of Puget Sound interstate that I drive on a regular basis. What I see instead are the three-lane chokepoints that run through the heart of Everett and that most obtusely planned stretch that runs under the convention center in Seattle. You know, where some schlub of a civil engineer has narrowed the freeway to two through lanes in the southbound direction and what basically amounts to a single merging lane in the northbound direction.

We can’t turn back the clock and make up for the mistakes of those who did things on the cheap decades ago, or make up for the politicians and citizens who sat on their consensus-seaking hands in all the subsequent years, but we can at least get driving instructions for the reality of what is out there.

What would really be ideal is to be able to bar all the incompetant drivers from even getting on the freeways in the first place. We need drop arms that respond to a special bar-code pass that is issued to those who show that they know how to drive properly on the freeway. Those who don’t qualify will be shunted off to other surface streets. Then if we could just get rid of those surface street drivers with no depth perception. You know, the ones who won’t close it up and leave other cars hanging in the intersections, or across the railroad tracks, because there are three car lengths between them and the vehicle in front.

Marysville