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Even John Hodgman thinks Portlanders are bad drivers.
In his New York Times advice column, the comedian and former Daily Show correspondent responded to a write-in about Portlander's refusal to zipper merge.
The most recent entry in Hodgman's column—in which he's referred to as "Judge John Hodgman," since readers write in asking the comedian to "order" someone or something to comply with a request—he addresses a complaint by Iain, a Portland resident of three years.
Iain asks Hodgman to order Portland drivers to embrace the zipper merge. An accepted practice just about everywhere else in the country, zipper merging is when cars use both lanes up to the merge point, then take turns getting into the new lane.
"As I drive by them to the merge point," Iain writes, "they often try to block me from merging and/or flip me the bird."
Though he agrees that zipper merging is more efficient, Hodgman decides that it's unlikely to catch on in a city known for its "punishing sanctimony."
"It will be generations before people accept what you're doing," he concludes. "And by that time, all the gas will be gone, cars won't exist and Portland will have won."
Mocking Portland's aggressively polite drivers is hardly a fresh comedic take, but at least Hodgman throws in a slightly less trodden jab about the fact that we line up at bars "like kindergartners waiting for a snack of beer."
Read the full column here.