I've been thinking about this since driving back from New Orleans. There are several really annoying (and arguably dangerous) things that people do which I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Some of them are things that I've long associated with Connecticut drivers (admittedly, not all asshole drivers are from Connecticut, but everyone from Connecticut is an asshole driver) but I'm pretty sure the first one is new to me.
1. There is a long line of traffic in the left lane, slowly passing a slow moving block of traffic in the right lane. At least one car in that line is leaving a safe distance from the preceding car. So you get in the right lane, zip down as far as you can, and force yourself into the gap without signaling, forcing the car behind you to put on the breaks. You're cutting in line, which makes you an asshole. You're doing something dangerous which makes you an idiot. And in the end, you may have saved yourself what, twenty seconds?
I wonder if part of this may be that Texas drivers like to keep gaps closer than are actually safe (this probably explains why we have such high insurance premiums compared to Massachusetts), and I leave these tempting safe gaps. On the six-hour drive between New Orleans and Houston (the Houston-Austin stretch was basically empty), I had maybe four cars get in front of a car in front of me, but quite a lot try it with me myself. Three managed it successfully, because they didn't signal and came up really fast; two of those were in the first few hours of the drive. After that, I kept closing the gap to unsafe distances when people tried to do this to me. I blocked over a dozen cars trying to do this to me. And I recognize that that's irrational and dangerous thing to do in my part, but it's driven by the innate human bias for fairness: I hate line cutters. I don't get what's driving the line-cutters to try to cut, given how little they have to gain by it.
Another interesting note about this: the vast majority of the people doing this were in white or silver cars, with two black cars and one blue car. But it's red cars who have a reputation for driving dangerously. I wonder what's up with that.
2. Driving in the left hand lane when the right-hand lane is empty. I have a family friend who does this, and she justifies it by saying that she'll get over if people need to pass her. And indeed, some people who drive in the left hand lane will pull over after they get passed on the right. But most of them don't.
3. Speeding up in order to pass you (often cutting you off in the process) and then driving more slowly than you were originally. Connecticut drivers do this a lot, but Louisiana and Texas drivers do it a fair bit too. Why? Do you have the pathological need for an entourage or something?
4. Matching the speed of people trying to pass you. Similar to number three, but less obviously obnoxious. This seems to be pretty much exclusive to pickup trucks. I usually slow down by 1-2 MPH if people are trying to pass me and doing a bad job of it. Why are you trying to drag race me, when we're both constrained by how far over the speed limit we're willing to go rather than the capacity of our cars? (Also, I have a really old, non-aerodynamic vehicle; I promise you I'd lose in a real drag race.)