I can, however, see room for misinterpretation if you happened to display the wrong message for the situation (e.g. you accidentally cut someone off, and your sign then flashed “Thanks!”)

1. Don’t let your vehicle the same space as any other vehicle or object.
2. Don’t scare anyone.

I wish we had a gesture understood to mean “I saw that guy cut you off. What a dick!” In other words a third party bird.

And a gesture understood to mean “Please put the g_dam phone down and pay attention to traffic.”

I try to reciprocate the consideration of nice drivers, but it’s very satisfying to block people who f_k other drivers over.

Because people don’t always see (or correctly interpret) the gestures I make to thank them for considerate driving; not can they hear my apologies for my own regular screwups.

In my defense I had cruise set and been slowly coming up on this person for a good 5+ miles, in the far left lane.  There weren’t really other cars around.  Once I got close enough I turned the cruise off and waited for a minute…I guess they thought I was too close.  Needless to say my econobox stopped quicker than whatever 80′s American land barge they were piloting (I forgot the exact model).  I backed off for a bit…but after another 5 miles I crept back up on them, in the far left lane.  And guess what?  They did that shit again.  Except this time I knew no one was in the lanes beside me.  So I just swerved right, floored it with all 120hp available and put some distance between myself and their “I’m driving 65 in the left lane no matter what.”

People ride with me and think they are going to die…candy asses need to stop being melodramatic.

And it is certainly something that is quickly apparent when you are driving abroad. In Sweden people will generally let you in if you are on an on-ramp, they wont accelerate and block you when you need to squeeze into a lane and will generally not be dicks to you.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but having driven all over Europe and quite a lot in the USA, I found that Swedish drivers are by far the most courteous of the bunch.

They are however also the least “alert”, in the sense that they won’t be as quick to let you pass, by moving out of the fast lane, which is something Italian drivers are really good at.

Also, unfortunately, traffic schools teach new drivers to be assholes to cyclists, so drivers are generally assholes to cyclists.

Go figure.

But in truth, education does seem to have a large impact, but it needs to come early, and there might also be a cultural component mixed in.

And the people driving super slow that as soon as someone tries to overtaking accelerates?
Simple rules for driving should go as follow:
Rule #1 – don’t crash
Rule #2 – assume other people are distracted
Rule #3 – be nice no matter what, ’cause the other guy might be a gun toting, axe wielding maniac

And never use your turn signal, because that just tells the other drivers how to adjust to block you from doing what you were hoping to do.

Until RPGs are legalized it’s not as if you’re going to actually teach anyone a lesson by doing something like honking at them.  

In other words, if you drive like an asshole when nobody is around, then it doesn’t really matter.  But in heavy traffic your performance is mandatory, but not sufficient, to keep the traffic moving. 

Like Woz mentions, this includes choosing the correct lane, knowing when to get over, and keeping an eye on all of the other cars around you.  The last part is why cellphones in cars are such a bad idea, because it’s basically impossible to maintain proper situational awareness while trying to carry on a conversation with someone who is not in the same situation, especially over crappy cell phone connections where your brain has to work extra hard to fill in the stuff the cell phone’s tight compression dropped. 

You might be surprised at just how bad cell phone quality is, especially in a noisy environment.  If you want to test this yourself, call up someone on your cellphone and have them read off something like a Windows Product Key over the phone.  Chances are you’ll copy it down wrong.  Without context for our brains to work with, it has to guess, and some of those guesses will be wrong. 

It seems to break into two overarching priorities:

1. Be predictable.
2. Be courteous.

I think that perfectly distills the social requirements of driving in traffic.