Abridged version published in On Our Selection News, November 10, 2016

I’ve never been happier not to have a car.

Don’t get me wrong, cars are great. They are capsules which allow you to bust out an emotionally-charged rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart in public without attracting a public nuisance charge. They offer air conditioned comfort on a hot day. They’re another place for you to store all that stuff you probably don’t need but don’t want to throw away (for me, it’s my beach cricket set, a two-man tent and several pairs of knock-off Ray Bans from Thailand) acting like a massive bottom drawer on wheels.

But the prospect of driving a car in Sydney makes me more uncomfortable than not wearing thongs in a campsite shower block. Because, from what I’ve observed during my short stint here, is that driving is way more stressful than it’s worth.

I’m not the first person to complain about Sydney driving and I’m not going to be the last, because it really is that awful. Because it’s not so much the traffic that’s the problem, it’s the people in the traffic.

For one thing, people here seem to love using their horns on their cars for things other than the standard “catch ya next time” beep combination usually reserved for leaving a family friend’s house.

The drivers here just like to beep at things. They use their horn not as a warning of impending danger, but as a way to express their feelings – and those feelings aren’t good ones.

This is something I learnt while sitting watching the traffic when I was waiting for a friend the other day.

The number of beeps of horns I heard in the space of 20 minutes gave me a pessimistic view of the direction humanity is heading in.

Because these weren’t friendly horns, they were aggressive toots of fury released in the form of a shill sound to show power over their opponents. It was like something out of a David Attenborough special.

I mean sure, sometimes the blasting of a horn was valid – like when someone had cut them off, which I did see a lot of. Drivers here are much like people in a hurry to get off a bus from the back seat, except they all really need to go to the toilet and are being led to behave completely irrationally out of fear of soiling themselves in public.

Think about the last time you were holding in a power spew and dashing to the nearest sink/bucket/Tupperware container – that’s the kind urgency people seem to apply to their driving.

But while there was the occasional legitimate need for tooting, most of the time there wasn’t.

Most of the time, the tooting happened will after the incident. I say “incident” lightly here because the seem to be incredibly grumpy over the mildest of inconveniences. Hey, I’m a fan of complaining. When I have a bit of spare time to myself, I love blowing minor issues out of proportion. I’m constantly dragging that horse around, preferring to let it rot out in the open to get into people’s noses instead of burying it in the ground. But there are mountains, there are molehills and there are tiny piles of a few dead skin cells and these drivers make Mount Kosciuszko out of a heap of foot shavings. Waiting an extra second to take off as the lights go green is unacceptable. Someone needing to merge in front of you? They may as well be asking for your spare kidney.

The tooting generally happens well after the initial infuriation like an intrusive proclamation of “I am displeased with your manner of driving”. There can be several seconds longer of beeping than was required (although beeping is hardly ever actually required) just so these people with horns can let the whole world know of their disgust at the small injustice inflicted upon them.

For whatever reason, they seem to think their three seconds of bother entitles them to annoy the rest of the population within a kilometre. It this same “if I’m not happy, no one can be happy” kind of caper that makes celibate religious leaders denounce unmarried sex as a sin. It’s like going into the office when you have an infectious cold. It’s like putting the whole household on a diet because you’re fat. It’s the classic, “if we burn, you burn with us,” sentiment from The Hunger Games. 

Many times I couldn’t figure out what prompted these people to take a hand off the wheel and risk losing control of their vehicle just to express their dislike at something. Maybe they have something to say with their hooting, but all I hear is “I have a heightened sense of self importance that is completely baseless”. And that’s coming from me, a person who assumes she’s going to get a state funeral that is televised on major networks.

Thank goodness for public transport (which I will critique soon enough).