Anyone who has lived in a big city has experienced this: A car doing something on the scale between mildly inconveniencing to very illegal with their hazard lights blinking, as if that makes everything they are doing OK. This footage of a banged-up Volkswagen Jetta driving backward down a main artery in St. Louis is a perfect example of that infuriating practice.
St. Louis man Darnell Singleton caught this footage while driving down Page Avenue, which serves as an east-west thoroughfare across the city. I’m begging you, watch the whole minute-and-a-half video, because Singleton’s commentary on the event should not be missed.
I plan to call everyone who thinks they are hot shit “pepper sauce” in the future. Those emergency blinkers are doing a lot of leg work in traffic. It also seems like Singleton was driving while shooting this video, which is definitely also a no-no. While we can’t condone distracted driving, just watching this Volkswagen drive trunk-first on a busy multi-lane road is also pretty damn distracting.
The driver in the VW did pretty well, actually, though they did halfway run a red light at one point and changed lanes without indicating. It makes me think this isn’t their first time doing something ass backward. The driver of the VW then merged into a turn lane. It appeared they were going to attempt to turn across two lane of busy traffic and into an auto shop. Singleton then drove off, so we don’t get to see if there was an attempted backward left turn. The video ends as Singleton announces that the police have arrived to handle the mixed-up VW.
There’s a certain pride to living in a city that other people might consider less desirable — it requires a certain level of grit and ingenuity. Apparently this isn’t the first skilled backward driver to come out of the Gateway to the West, according to River Front Times. The driver of a Pontiac Grand Prix drove in reverse through even busier traffic in 2017. Maybe there’s something to this “only in St. Louis” catchphrase.