Had yet another commute today that involved the usual hot garbage smoothie of aggression, obliviousness, distraction, and general disdain for fellow drivers and their safety. Nothing unusual, but the relentless awfulness of fellow drivers is wearing me down.
The distillation of the Toronto driving experience today was coming off the Skyway northbound and around the corner towards Toronto on the QEW in the left lane, passing the usual line of tractor trailers on the right as I do about a buck twenty. As the 403 traffic merges on the right, an ancient maroon minivan yanks the wheel to cross about five lanes of traffic to end up in front of me in the left lane. But he's only doing about 80, so I have to get relatively hard on the brakes. At the same time, a large SUV has ripped up behind me at a massive rate of speed and is inches off my rear bumper (hard to judge in a mirror, but he came up on me easily well over 160), and so as I'm braking hard, he has to brake even harder. And because he's oblivious, he's now convinced I just brake checked him, and so as soon as he has a gap he rips around me on the right (cutting a truck off, of course) and squeezes himself into the to small gap between me and the minivan ahead and proceeds to brake check me hard, waving his hands, before jumping across two solids into the HOV lane and disappearing (for about 10 seconds until the inevitable slowdown ahead brings us all back together).
The crazy part is that there's absolutely nothing remarkable about the above, either the oblivious minivan or the raged out SUV. It's just another day on Toronto roads. I'm genuinely considering packing in riding on the street. I know it's old man syndrome and, "back in my day!", etc., but I feel like the number of drivers in and around the GTA who are legitimate menaces has reached some kind of tipping point, and it's verging on irresponsible to be wading in to this mess as exposed as I am on a bike.
You have a toxic brew of a bunch of wildly different driving styles from all corners of the world, zero effort to confirm to local standards, lots of road rage because everyone's idea of 'normal' driving is different, insane traffic and city planning that actively hates cars (not all bad, to be fair, but you have to offer viable alternatives, not just make driving worse), total lack of patience because of the above, functionally zero law enforcement (bar some occasional lazy speed trapping), a broken housing market that forces many people into longer and longer commutes, the list is endless. The stuff I see on the roads daily is genuinely stupefying.
Anyway, wasn't sure where else to put this thought vomit, but here seemed as good a place as any. Anyone wanna buy a Tuono? It's been well cared for and is a perfect motorcycle for almost anywhere else in Canada where the roads have corners that aren't bumper to bumper with idiots and ar*eholes...