Driving 101: You can't hot-wheel around a presidential motorcade

Traffic tip for the days ahead: If you see a motorcade with police cars, black SUVs and guys with sunglasses talking into their cuffs, don't try to cut it off.

One couple tried to drive their tan sedan around Barack Obama's motorcade downtown Thursday morning and found themselves looking at the barrels of Secret Service firepower.

"The [Secret Service] SUV cut the car off immediately, and the security team aimed their weapons at the car," a reporter in the motorcade wrote in a pool report. "The driver and passenger in the sedan stopped and looked stunned -- until the male driver appeared to understand what was happening (your pool reporter could see him mouth 'Obama')."

The president-elect was on his way to a security briefing at FBI headquarters in the Loop, when the motorcade left Lake Shore Drive and the sedan tried to drive around it on Van Buren, according to the pool reporter, P.J. Huffstutter, the Los Angeles Times' Midwest Bureau chief.

"Some of the drivers here in Chicago do not seem to understand that a) The Chicago police car at the end of the president-elect's motorcade is serious about having traffic pull over when the officers flash their lights and hit their sirens, and b) It's not a great idea to jump ahead of traffic by trying to cut around the black SUV filled with five heavily-armed Secret Service CAT members," Huffstutter wrote.