Know this car? BLUE VUE

Every once in a while (well, every day) somebody does something really stupid. And, when they drive cars with personalized or vanity license plates, maybe they really should think first about how identifiable they are.

This afternoon I was driving north on Pyott Road from Algonquin Road. The speed limit up the hill is 40MPH, and then it increases to 50MPH.

And who is behind me? A car I’ve seen before – a blue Saturn Vue with the vanity license plate BLUE VUE. I may even have seen this license plate around Woodstock.

Well, this driver was getting very antsy at my “poking along” at the speed limit. He came up close behind me two-three times and then backed off a little. And then it happened…

Near the bottom of the hill at Industrial Drive, he decided to pass, even though I was traveling exactly at 50MPH on Cruise Control. I was keeping an eye on him and expecting him to do so, but what I didn’t expect is that he would try to intimidate me by passing me so closely that I had to move to the right to avoid being side-swiped. When he passed, the right-side tires on his car were still well on the right side of the center of the roadway.

Did he save a lot of time? Not hardly. When I got to the light at Rakow Road, guess who was right of front of me? You got it! And then at Virginia Road and again at the red light on Main Street at U.S. 14. He was in the through lane, so I pulled up on the left side in the left turn lane and got about ten seconds of clear video of the driver’s face.

Tonight I have emailed a traffic complaint to the Lake in the Hills Police Department, and tomorrow I’ll go by to discuss filing a traffic complaint and having that driver hauled into McHenry County Traffic Court.

That’s the kind of driving that gets people killed, and that driver needs a wake-up call and a good lesson from a tough judge. And about $175 in fines and court costs; hopefully, no court supervision. Just a stiff fine and a conviction reported to the DMV, where it will go on to hit his insurance records and result in an increase in auto insurance premium.