The fact that I-95 is not directly connected with the rest of the interstate system is highly significant, as you know if you are familiar with the biological development of species in Australia. Australia is separated from the normal continents by large quantities of water, the result being that it has developed life forms -- the koala bear, the platypus, the boomerang -- that are unlike anything else in the world. This is basically what has happened to the drivers on I-95. They are different.

Outsiders, when they first drive on I-95, notice this fact right away, and remark on it. "Those people are CRAZY!" they remark, after the various intensive care tubes have been removed from their noses. "Those people must be on DRUGS!"

Granted, but the real problem is that these drivers have spent too much time festering in this fetid interstate backwater, unreplenished by the freshening flow of through traffic behaving in predictable fashion, and thus they have mutated. To make matters worse, most of them had bizarre driving habits to begin with. This is because many of them are (name of ethnic or age group that you do not belong to). I discovered this fact when I was researching this story. I would ask each person I met: "Why do people drive the way they do on I-95?" And the person would always answer: "Well, you got a lot of (name of ethnic or age group the person speaking did not belong to), and you also got a lot of (name of another ethnic or age group the person did not belong to). Those people do NOT know how to drive." EVERYBODY I talked to agreed on this.

Another, even more important, factor is the design of the road itself.

What I believe happened was, the road designers just got bored. I mean, here they had designed this road all the way down from Maine, and the whole distance, over 1,700 miles, they had used the traditional, stuffy old limited-access highway design, which is that you have people pass on the left, and exit on the right. And these highway designers were just sick of it. They felt that if they saw one more exit off to the right, they were going to throw up right on their blueprints.

So they thought: Here is Miami, here is a town that is receptive to new ideas -- the kind of wide-open

town where someday a person who is not even a United States citizen could very well come in and put giant sheets of plastic colored Bazooka Bubble Gum Pink around a totally innocent batch of islands -- and he wouldn't even be detained for questioning. They thought: Let's have some fun here.

So they came up with the concept of the Exit Going Off To The Left. And then (Why not? Why the hell not?) they came up with the Exit Going Off The Middle. And then -- this was a night they still talk about whenever highway designers get together -- they came up with the concept of the Golden Glades Interchange, where, if you are approaching it from the south, it looks as though there is nothing ahead except exits, and no way whatsoever to get back to a normal state, such as Maryland.

Which would be fine if the bulk of motorists were well- rested professional racing-car drivers with excellent memories, but unfortunately we are talking about the aforementioned mutated ethnic and age groups. And so we now have a situation where a large percentage of people drive in the left lane at a speed normally associated with the Drive-Thru Window at Burger King, because they are concerned that their exit might suddenly appear there, over on the left. Even if it wasn't there yesterday, it might be there today. You never know.