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The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
While I recognize that absolute need for safety, some things really rail on my nerves. I had a 1600-mile round trip, grandparents pick up to do with my dad sitting shotgun. He absolutely forbade me to go anywhere above 75 mph and wouldn't let me use cruise. Do you have any idea how sore your leg and ass can get, having to constantly push and let off on the gas pedal?
So letting your leg cramp is more safe than setting the cruise? I'll never get that..
Yeah, I tried to tell him that, and he pulled the authority figure, "Just do what I say" bullshit. Also, apparently there are patrol cars lining every inch of the highway ready to bust me with a $500 ticket for going 10 miles per hour over the limit.
I don't think I ever want to drive with my dad again. Actually, I don't ever want to perform any sort of task with my dad supervising me.
Man, my dad is a total pain to drive with. He's the very definition of a backseat driver. It's infuriating. In fact, all backseat drivers are. In his defense, he often knows what he's talking about, and cruise control is meant for long trips like that. What the hell?
While I recognize that absolute need for safety, some things really rail on my nerves. I had a 1600-mile round trip, grandparents pick up to do with my dad sitting shotgun. He absolutely forbade me to go anywhere above 75 mph and wouldn't let me use cruise. Do you have any idea how sore your leg and ass can get, having to constantly push and let off on the gas pedal?
So letting your leg cramp is more safe than setting the cruise? I'll never get that..
Yeah, I tried to tell him that, and he pulled the authority figure, "Just do what I say" bullshit. Also, apparently there are patrol cars lining every inch of the highway ready to bust me with a $500 ticket for going 10 miles per hour over the limit.
I don't think I ever want to drive with my dad again. Actually, I don't ever want to perform any sort of task with my dad supervising me.
Man, my dad is a total pain to drive with. He's the very definition of a backseat driver. It's infuriating. In fact, all backseat drivers are. In his defense, he often knows what he's talking about, and cruise control is meant for long trips like that. What the hell?
I dunno, he probably thought I was too inexperienced a driver to use it or something. Granted, he is an incredibly precise, safe driver and the only one in our family to not ever have crashed while driving. At the same time, he complains about getting tired on long drives while refusing to use cruise control for whatever reason.
In Green Bay, WI, you have all these single-lane roads that will turn into two lanes when you come to an intersection. The second lane is so you can turn right, of course. Ahead, there's still only one lane. Can you guess what people do? It happens all the time.
They floor it straight instead of turning and try to cut off the other people. More often then not there's not a lot of space for them to get ahead, so they keep driving in the space reserved for parked cars until they're ahead of everyone. I've seen countless times other drivers who get pissed off at this and try to match their speed with the offender and then it turns into an angry race. Every single time I drove this happened.
And speaking of that space reserved for parked cars, the space you're not suppose to drive on, I've seen people use this to pass cars even when they're not trying to get ahead of people from the intersection. This old, old lady did it and she kept going for the entire distance of the street, passing cars.
There's never a cop around when you need one!
Dashui on
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I like the part at :15 where he's going straight for the curb and he decides to accelerate.
He is actually braking at that point. To see just how slippery it was, he hits the cars at the bottom of the hill and all 5 of them with the brakes on can't stop him from moving.
The only time he was accelerating was to try and get out of the way of the pole at about 9-10 seconds in.(which didn't work)
I was there for that storm(well, i was in seattle, we had it a bit worse), it rained for a day before and then it all froze when the cold weather came in. You could barely stand on those streets let alone drive on them.
Those hills in question are also pretty steep, the angle that the camera is in belies the steepness of it.
I would not have gone near that without studded snowtires in an all wheel drive car. Then again, i was lucky since i was not out during that storm. If I had been, i would have had to brave worse roads than they did simply because there is no other way to get to my house without walking a good long ways. I can nearly guarantee you that none of those people had snow tires in, there just isn't usually a reason in Seattle (or especially portland) since you rarely get snow. And i an also bet that a lot of them had to take those types of hills in order to get to where they lived.
The snow really isn't an issue when it gets cold in the North West, the issue is that all the roads are already wet before it gets cold, and that all turns to ice. Its actually easier to drive when you get a lot of snow, since that will pack down over the ice and make a nice place for your chains and studs to dig into.
Those people were, in all liklihood, right fucked and there wasn't much they could do about it.
First out: I am not god's gift to driving and I know that. Thats why I assume the same from all the cunts around me. Some of them do not share that revelation and that is what makes them dangerous.
Dunno if anyone here knows cologne, but it is an old city and all roads apart form the Autobahn are not really wide. So there is a two lane road along the river, narrow enough to make me think twice about overtaking a truck unless I am at a red light or a long straight. It is my drive home road.
Guy sets his marker for turning right on an intersection, there is a nice long lane for going right. He's beside me while I am going straight. Intersection comes, something in my bowels tells me the guy is changing his mind - and lo and and behold he decides not to turn right IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING INTERSECTION und pulls into my lane without looking. If I had'nt put my foot off gas like 5 seconds before he would have smashed into my side. After 20 years of driving I guess you develop an idoit antenna.
I still honked at him for like 2 minutes.
Other story is from a friend of mine who drives a cement truck. Not something you can stop just like that while going 70 Km/h (whatever that is in miles). Also not something that you use to race taxis on a red light. Anyway he had a particular impatinet taxi driver behind him, who could not overtake him because of traffic on the other lane. At some point he manged it, pullled back in the right lane right before him and did a hard brake (to annoy him I guess - or he had a death wish).
Well 3 tons of concrete and another ton of steel do not just stop. So he got a free ride for about 100 meters on the bonnet of a very pissed and shocked truck driver. He was unharmed but my friend had a very very deep urge to change that.
Don't ask me what I have seen on the Autobahns. No speed limit is not a good thing if you ask me.
Now, on to my bad driving story! I used to have to go down CO-43 to work. It's a two lane highway that goes between Golden, CO and Boulder, CO. Anyway, it has a reputation for being rather hazardous to drive in, which it rightfully deserves, most of the time. This is also Colorado, which has a completely untrue reputation for being a snowy state. And you also have fuck tons of Californication, so there are a lot of drivers from states that rarely if ever see any sort of snow.
Now, combine out-of-state drivers utterly unprepared for snow driving living in a state that has a reputation for have incredibly bad winter weather but doesn't actually have winter weather that bad so they don't get practice driving on a road that has a reputation for being treacherous in bad weather and you get people who FREAK THE FUCK OUT AT THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF SNOW.
One time, it had snowed a very tiny bit (less than an inch). So, I got up early and started heading to work expecting drivers who didn't know what they were doing. Unfortunately, on this fine day, I had the fine luck of being behind the Platonic form of driver that freaks the fuck out if there's anything remotely white on the road... in a Range Rover.
My car is a FWD piece of crap. It's not great to drive in the snow, but I have the experience so I do it just fine. However, on this particular day, I didn't need any of my skills. The roads were no worse and, in some ways, better than a slightly wet road after a brief rain storm. Unfortunately, this person in the Range Rover decided to go 15 MPH the whole way. This is a one-lane highway and there are almost no good places to pass due to timing issues. This commute, at normal speed, took me about 30 minutes. On a really snowy day, it takes about 45 minutes. On this day, it took 1.5 hours. WTF? I wanted to kill that person in the Range Rover soooooo hard.
Pal of mine has the trip to his house memorised so he can drive it at night without his lights on. I've been with him when he's done it, and while it was pretty cool, and noone was around it was still way too dangerous and stupid. We were going about 60 in pitch black, can't see anything in front of us.
Pal of mine has the trip to his house memorised so he can drive it at night without his lights on. I've been with him when he's done it, and while it was pretty cool, and noone was around it was still way too dangerous and stupid. We were going about 60 in pitch black, can't see anything in front of us.
That's just plain stupid. Even if there is only one car around every hour.
I had a car parked on the right lane of a freeway (in a curve of all things) while driving at night and it gave me like 2 seconds to react -wayy too close for comfort. Now imagine that thing moving.
Drunken Bastard on
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Other story is from a friend of mine who drives a cement truck. Not something you can stop just like that while going 70 Km/h (whatever that is in miles). Also not something that you use to race taxis on a red light. Anyway he had a particular impatinet taxi driver behind him, who could not overtake him because of traffic on the other lane. At some point he manged it, pullled back in the right lane right before him and did a hard brake (to annoy him I guess - or he had a death wish).
Well 3 tons of concrete and another ton of steel do not just stop. So he got a free ride for about 100 meters on the bonnet of a very pissed and shocked truck driver. He was unharmed but my friend had a very very deep urge to change that.
It always amazes me how many people will jump into the space before a loaded tractor/trailer while approaching a red light, somehow assuming that a vehicle with 7 axles and 22 tires has the same stopping distance as a Civic.
Other story is from a friend of mine who drives a cement truck. Not something you can stop just like that while going 70 Km/h (whatever that is in miles). Also not something that you use to race taxis on a red light. Anyway he had a particular impatinet taxi driver behind him, who could not overtake him because of traffic on the other lane. At some point he manged it, pullled back in the right lane right before him and did a hard brake (to annoy him I guess - or he had a death wish).
Well 3 tons of concrete and another ton of steel do not just stop. So he got a free ride for about 100 meters on the bonnet of a very pissed and shocked truck driver. He was unharmed but my friend had a very very deep urge to change that.
It always amazes me how many people will jump into the space before a loaded tractor/trailer while approaching a red light, somehow assuming that a vehicle with 7 axles and 22 tires has the same stopping distance as a Civic.
They think they are immortal in their little tin can. Why? Beats me.
Pal of mine has the trip to his house memorised so he can drive it at night without his lights on. I've been with him when he's done it, and while it was pretty cool, and noone was around it was still way too dangerous and stupid. We were going about 60 in pitch black, can't see anything in front of us.
That's just plain stupid. Even if there is only one car around every hour.
I had a car parked on the right lane of a freeway (in a curve of all things) while driving at night and it gave me like 2 seconds to react -wayy too close for comfort. Now imagine that thing moving.
Yeah I know, but this is way back in the backwoods so it's not like there's ever a lot of traffic. Still stupid though.
Now, on to my bad driving story! I used to have to go down CO-43 to work. It's a two lane highway that goes between Golden, CO and Boulder, CO. Anyway, it has a reputation for being rather hazardous to drive in, which it rightfully deserves, most of the time. This is also Colorado, which has a completely untrue reputation for being a snowy state. And you also have fuck tons of Californication, so there are a lot of drivers from states that rarely if ever see any sort of snow.
I think you mean CO-93, actually. ;-)
I've driven it though, and there's a few dangerous hilly points. Then again, there's a few long straight stretches that people like to suddenly reverse direction on though, too. (With snow, generally.)
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
My favorite part about driving in Colorado is the long, winding mountain roads with a steep thousand-foot drop on one side. It's not that they are exceptionally dangerous; it's that people from flat states are just goddamn terrified of them. Driving over some of the higher passes (especially in summer), you'll often run into a convoy of six or seven vehicles, all creeping along at 5 to 10 miles per hour. And every time the cause is the same—someone from Nebraska or Kansas is in front, with eyeballs as big as saucers and an unshakeable death-grip on the steering wheel.
Not that anyone should drive faster than they feel comfortable driving (especially in an unfamiliar scenario), of course. I'm sure it takes a lot of getting used to. The polite thing to do, though, is to pull over to the side of the road when you find a wide spot, and resume your crawl up (or down) the mountain when the six guys trailing you have passed.
Being a Nebraskan, I can confirm the feeling of dread when driving around in the mountains.
Though the worst I've ever been was not in the mountains, but going to the Needles to climb in South Dakota. There was this long crazy winding road and the guy that was driving was so obsessed about keeping up with my friend's car ahead of us. The driver was just all over the place and I very nearly got sick.
But I remember having that death grip on my steering wheel the first time I drove down I-25. Not because of the mountains of course, but because it was rush hour.
I have to admit I get a bit nervous driving along mountain roads like that, I much prefer the nice danger of a landslide crushing me while driving through a road cut into the mountain. The thought of the drop just gets to me.
Europe has the good idea of having guard rails on 'crazy drop off' roads that go down to the actual road surface. I was driving through a pass once and came upon a big old traffic jam. As I crept by the flashing lights of the State Trooper I saw where a motorcycle had skid/slid across the road and into the guardrail. And on the underside of the rail was a nice smear of blood and hair. Can't help but assume that the guy went under the rail and over the edge, ugh.
My grandmother is something to drive with. You see, she's a small woman, and her car has an overly stiff accelerator, so the only way she can speed up is slamming her foot down on the thing and letting up.
Also, never take a cab in Egypt. My dad learned this the hard way. Next thing he knew, he was speeding along the breakdown lane of the highway on the opposing side.
Looked up some info about the tunnel, and according to wikipedia:
"The tunnel runs under the Yauza River, and water leaks in at some points. The temperature can reach as low as −38 degrees Celsius (as during the winter of 2005), causing the the water on the road's surface to freeze."
"It has been nicknamed "The Tunnel of Death" due to its high accident rate and a video circulating around the Internet compiling footage of vehicle accidents recorded by monitoring cameras."
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
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GoslingLooking Up Soccer In Mongolia Right Now, ProbablyWatertown, WIRegistered Userregular
My favorite part about driving in Colorado is the long, winding mountain roads with a steep thousand-foot drop on one side. It's not that they are exceptionally dangerous; it's that people from flat states are just goddamn terrified of them. Driving over some of the higher passes (especially in summer), you'll often run into a convoy of six or seven vehicles, all creeping along at 5 to 10 miles per hour. And every time the cause is the same—someone from Nebraska or Kansas is in front, with eyeballs as big as saucers and an unshakeable death-grip on the steering wheel.
Not that anyone should drive faster than they feel comfortable driving (especially in an unfamiliar scenario), of course. I'm sure it takes a lot of getting used to. The polite thing to do, though, is to pull over to the side of the road when you find a wide spot, and resume your crawl up (or down) the mountain when the six guys trailing you have passed.
You just described my mom in Salt River Canyon, Arizona, trying to get out of the canyon before sunset.
Gosling on
I have a new soccer blog The Minnow Tank. Reading it psychically kicks Sepp Blatter in the bean bag.
What the fuck are these people doing that they randomly loose control like that? o_O
Typically its speed. The faster you're going the more that you're likely to get air under your car(or rather, you get more air under your car). When you get air under your car and it builds up, instead of your car's shape/weight pushing you onto the ground it starts to lift you off of the ground. Most cars are shaped similar to wings and only are held onto the ground by spoilers and various other downforce adding mechanisms the more air under the car the easier it is for them to fail or be counteracted.
Anyway as you go faster your steering gets a lot lighter because of this, and any movement is likely to cause larger than expected movements than you want. Think of the first time you drove a car with a joypad in a video game. The car would always go too far because you were always hitting the key too long. The same thing happens, a small turn on the wheel, and the now light car springs into action, weight shifts to the wheel that is doing the turning (outside front) which slows that wheel down relative to the rest. This pulls the (already light due to the speed) back end around even farther accentuating the turn and making the car harder to handle.
O.K. now you're in a hard turn that occurred suddenly and its time to correct. Oh, and you have to do it before you hit the guard rail, and you may or may not still have traction.
edit: Going over the video again, it seems that only two were definitively not caused by too high speeds. (two you can't tell, the rest are pretty clearly caused by too high speeds). These are the jack knifing public bus and the one at the end.
With the bus i've no clue how it happened(but it doesn't look like speed to me since the cars behind it were just starting to come up on it, or if it was it was way off camera), but that driver is quite good for keeping that thing from flipping or plowing into a wall.
For the other, a similar thing happened. Someone merged in front of the vehicle. The crash victim braked hard and then realizing he was going to rear end the other one anyway, tried to swerve. Braking shifts the weight to the front, turning to the outside, turn becomes more than he expects and then he over corrects into the wall.
I still remember as a kid, riding with my older sister and her friends (who were all around ten years older than me. I'm the baby of the family) through the city at night back to our house. Anyway, we get caught in the middle of a traffic jam and get stuck right next to the usual idiots who play crappy music at the highest volume possible from their cars, with their windows down. Thumping bass and random people yelling to the lyrics does not mix well with a child as young as I was back then. So my sister's friend, who is driving, gets an idea.
He rolls his windows down as well and pops in a CD just before telling us to "Cover your ears, guys." At that moment, Somwhere Over the Rainbow starts blaring out of his speakers. Judy Garland's voice basically drowns out the other car's horrible club tunes so fast that it made my head spin. The other car quickly turns down its music, and in-turn we respond likewise. Our point was made.
Strangely enough, to this day I have no idea why he kept a Wizard of Oz CD in his glove compartment.
I remember my first time driving. My mom pawned me (and my permit) off on a friend of hers, and instead of easing me into by, I don't know, taking me to a nice quiet neighborhood or new housing development to do some low-speed familiarization she figured it'd be a great idea to let me drive down to Wendy's to get us a snack.
So off I go down 7th Avenue in Phoenix, at night no less. I didn't realize how much you had to slow down to make a turn, so I basically tried to turn into the Wendy's parking lot at like 45. Good times. Other hilarity ensued, but that was the part that was particularly bad.
My parents sent me to a driving school when I was 16. The first time my instructor had me drive, it was on the interstate. Previous to this I had only driven a few times with my parents in an empty parking lot. This guy knew this and still forced me on. How we survived I'll never know. I do know at the first sign of an exit he was screaming for me to get off.
He ended up failing me, but marked passed on my sheet so I ended up getting my license anyways (because I went to a driving school I didn't have to take a test with a DMV instructor).
Don't ask me what I have seen on the Autobahns. No speed limit is not a good thing if you ask me.
This. They really need to get on that. Personally, I really don't enjoy having to fear for my life every time I pass a truck on a two-lane autobahn just because I'm only going 170 km/h (Google says approx. 105 mph).
Way too many retards insisting on going like 240+ km/h. At night.
Also, it's kind of scary reading how easy it apparently is to get a driver's license in some parts of the states. That certainly helps explain some of the videos posted in this thread.
Georgia's driving exam when I got my license consisted of a written test, and some simple parking maneuvers in the parking lot of the DMV.
Never had to take driving classes, no courses required. Hence why most Georgia natives are flipping retards behind the wheel... fortunately my Dad is a harsh teacher and I've learned well.
To be honest, you haven't lived until you've gone down the Autobahn in a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S at 235 km/h.
I've got absolutely no problem with that as long as you do it when
a) there isn't a whole lot of traffic
b) you can actually see the road
and
c) there are more than two lanes.
Nothing wrong with going fast as long as you don't endanger others. Since most people don't seem capable of that, I'm very much in favor of speed limits on the Autobahn. Just don't make them as low as most other European countries. 130 km/h is a joke.
Oh, and Aurin: That really is fucking scary. Is it usually that easy in the rest of the USA (or most of it) as well? I can't seem to find a decent list comparing the individual states.
Although, to be fair, it's not like our stricter standards prevent any of the idiots from getting a license. Hell, most people around here seem incapable of recognizing that not every somewhat narrow road automatically has a 30 km/h speed limit. So I'm stuck behind some idiot going 20 km/h below the speed limit just about every day.
I know it's a joke but North Jersey blows to drive in. No one signals for shit, the Parkway lanes are too narrow for everyones (usually) unnecessarily gigantic vehicles and they have no concern for
1. Other drivers
2. Road conditions
3. Shit weather
RUN, DON'T WALK!
Because if you are only walking, you will get murdered. Every month there is another pedestrian accident in my area and that is just at the train stations. I imagine it has to do largely with pedestrians being the same oblivious assholes who tend to be behind the wheel. But for fuck's sake, go easy on them - they are made of flesh.
BUT I'VE GOT SOMEWHERE TO BE!
Everyone in Jersey is the asshole at some point. Everyone. No matter what. Myself included. I will, for reasons I can justify at the time, speed and squeeze through lights I didn't really make because "I've got somewhere to be." Which is a lie. I never have anywhere to be. I always leave early for everything I need to get to and my lifestyle doesn't lend itself to pressing engagements. It's just that we can get away with it because there are so damn many of us. And if there weren't so damn many of us, we might not feel like we had to. I envy the guy who says "fuck it" and just drives the shoulder past the traffic and while I may never commit to the role as much as that guy does, I know I'm just as guilty of being a self-centered twit as that man.
DID I MENTION THE RACING?!
I went to school in rural Maryland and I would see some amount of racing. But these were always along roads in the middle of farms. Sure, it is still stupid and dangerous but the number of people potentially hurt was pretty low. The stupidity necessary to want to race through Metropark at 8 on a Friday night is frightening.
Either it's a ghost truck that came out of the wall, or a truck from a parallel dimension moved into ours and tried to occupy the same space as the first one.
To be honest, you haven't lived until you've gone down the Autobahn in a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S at 235 km/h.
It wasn't a Porsche and it certainly wasn't 235, but I remember going down to France via Germany once.
Suddenly we see the spoiler thingie on the roof of a truck in front of us rip loose and fly up in the air, narrowly missing our car and landing behind us.
We stopped at the first available spot to get clean underwear.
I won't get into all the stories as an EMT that make me hate drunk drivers with a burning rage and will instead mention two of the more humorous calls I was ever on.
The first was this brilliant guy who decided to go down on his girlfriend while he was driving during a thunderstorm. He had leaned over to perform the act and thus drove right off the road down a thirty foot embankment into a tree. Since there was a chance for a major spinal injury, we went really slowly getting him out, took about an hour the whole of which his face was buried in his gf's crotch. Luckily neither suffered a permanent injury.
The second was this kid learning to drive with his dad. I guess they had stopped at a 7-11 before driving and the kid had set his big gulp on the armrest while driving and it ended up falling into the back seat. So the kid turns around to get it, forgetting that he is behind the wheel of a moving vehicle and he ends up steering the car into a tree. The kid seemed more shaken up than anything, although he did have a broken arm but while we were working on the kid, the dad was sitting on the curb muttering to himself "I should have let his mother teach him, I should have let his mother teach him" over and over. At random intervals he would laugh, shake his head and say "it's my fault for not letting his mother teach him".
Oh, and Aurin: That really is fucking scary. Is it usually that easy in the rest of the USA (or most of it) as well? I can't seem to find a decent list comparing the individual states.
Not sure, really, but I do know that in Arizona my license lasts for like... 40 or 50 years. Hence why we have old retirees out here driving like blind morons. >.>
Edit: Actually, I take that back. Most of the 80+ crowd drives fine. They just don't do the speed limit, which pisses off the younger idiots, hence making things more dangerous.
The worst thing I've had happen here is some guy trying to merge on top of my Camaro with his truck. x_x
I think, in Georgia all you have to do is show up and take the driving test after having your learners permit for 24 hours, if you're over 18 anyway, I forget what it is for 16 year olds.
I know it's a joke but North Jersey blows to drive in. No one signals for shit, the Parkway lanes are too narrow for everyones (usually) unnecessarily gigantic vehicles and they have no concern for
1. Other drivers
2. Road conditions
3. Shit weather
RUN, DON'T WALK!
Because if you are only walking, you will get murdered. Every month there is another pedestrian accident in my area and that is just at the train stations. I imagine it has to do largely with pedestrians being the same oblivious assholes who tend to be behind the wheel. But for fuck's sake, go easy on them - they are made of flesh.
BUT I'VE GOT SOMEWHERE TO BE!
Everyone in Jersey is the asshole at some point. Everyone. No matter what. Myself included. I will, for reasons I can justify at the time, speed and squeeze through lights I didn't really make because "I've got somewhere to be." Which is a lie. I never have anywhere to be. I always leave early for everything I need to get to and my lifestyle doesn't lend itself to pressing engagements. It's just that we can get away with it because there are so damn many of us. And if there weren't so damn many of us, we might not feel like we had to. I envy the guy who says "fuck it" and just drives the shoulder past the traffic and while I may never commit to the role as much as that guy does, I know I'm just as guilty of being a self-centered twit as that man.
DID I MENTION THE RACING?!
I went to school in rural Maryland and I would see some amount of racing. But these were always along roads in the middle of farms. Sure, it is still stupid and dangerous but the number of people potentially hurt was pretty low. The stupidity necessary to want to race through Metropark at 8 on a Friday night is frightening.
To be fair, this gets less true the further away from NYC you get. In rural Jersey the driving isnt that bad.
I had an awesome driving experience recently: driving 4 hours from upstate new york into NYC in a 14' uhaul, on two hours sleep, approaching the GW bridge and realizing the uhaul was almost out of gas and I had to pee like a motherfucker. Nothing scarier than the idea of running out of gas on the GW bridge with a full bladder.
postinonthenets on
Solitude sometimes is best society, and short retirement urges sweet return
Now, on to my bad driving story! I used to have to go down CO-43 to work. It's a two lane highway that goes between Golden, CO and Boulder, CO. Anyway, it has a reputation for being rather hazardous to drive in, which it rightfully deserves, most of the time. This is also Colorado, which has a completely untrue reputation for being a snowy state. And you also have fuck tons of Californication, so there are a lot of drivers from states that rarely if ever see any sort of snow.
I think you mean CO-93, actually. ;-)
I've driven it though, and there's a few dangerous hilly points. Then again, there's a few long straight stretches that people like to suddenly reverse direction on though, too. (With snow, generally.)
Yeah. That's what I said. <.<
Anyway, yeah, it can get bad in truly bad weather. This wasn't bad at all. It made me cry.
Posts
Man, my dad is a total pain to drive with. He's the very definition of a backseat driver. It's infuriating. In fact, all backseat drivers are. In his defense, he often knows what he's talking about, and cruise control is meant for long trips like that. What the hell?
I dunno, he probably thought I was too inexperienced a driver to use it or something. Granted, he is an incredibly precise, safe driver and the only one in our family to not ever have crashed while driving. At the same time, he complains about getting tired on long drives while refusing to use cruise control for whatever reason.
They floor it straight instead of turning and try to cut off the other people. More often then not there's not a lot of space for them to get ahead, so they keep driving in the space reserved for parked cars until they're ahead of everyone. I've seen countless times other drivers who get pissed off at this and try to match their speed with the offender and then it turns into an angry race. Every single time I drove this happened.
And speaking of that space reserved for parked cars, the space you're not suppose to drive on, I've seen people use this to pass cars even when they're not trying to get ahead of people from the intersection. This old, old lady did it and she kept going for the entire distance of the street, passing cars.
There's never a cop around when you need one!
He is actually braking at that point. To see just how slippery it was, he hits the cars at the bottom of the hill and all 5 of them with the brakes on can't stop him from moving.
The only time he was accelerating was to try and get out of the way of the pole at about 9-10 seconds in.(which didn't work)
I was there for that storm(well, i was in seattle, we had it a bit worse), it rained for a day before and then it all froze when the cold weather came in. You could barely stand on those streets let alone drive on them.
Those hills in question are also pretty steep, the angle that the camera is in belies the steepness of it.
I would not have gone near that without studded snowtires in an all wheel drive car. Then again, i was lucky since i was not out during that storm. If I had been, i would have had to brave worse roads than they did simply because there is no other way to get to my house without walking a good long ways. I can nearly guarantee you that none of those people had snow tires in, there just isn't usually a reason in Seattle (or especially portland) since you rarely get snow. And i an also bet that a lot of them had to take those types of hills in order to get to where they lived.
The snow really isn't an issue when it gets cold in the North West, the issue is that all the roads are already wet before it gets cold, and that all turns to ice. Its actually easier to drive when you get a lot of snow, since that will pack down over the ice and make a nice place for your chains and studs to dig into.
Those people were, in all liklihood, right fucked and there wasn't much they could do about it.
How the fuck did the driver survive? It just doesn't seem possible!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElgZiJ3uIio
First out: I am not god's gift to driving and I know that. Thats why I assume the same from all the cunts around me. Some of them do not share that revelation and that is what makes them dangerous.
Dunno if anyone here knows cologne, but it is an old city and all roads apart form the Autobahn are not really wide. So there is a two lane road along the river, narrow enough to make me think twice about overtaking a truck unless I am at a red light or a long straight. It is my drive home road.
Guy sets his marker for turning right on an intersection, there is a nice long lane for going right. He's beside me while I am going straight. Intersection comes, something in my bowels tells me the guy is changing his mind - and lo and and behold he decides not to turn right IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING INTERSECTION und pulls into my lane without looking. If I had'nt put my foot off gas like 5 seconds before he would have smashed into my side. After 20 years of driving I guess you develop an idoit antenna.
I still honked at him for like 2 minutes.
Other story is from a friend of mine who drives a cement truck. Not something you can stop just like that while going 70 Km/h (whatever that is in miles). Also not something that you use to race taxis on a red light. Anyway he had a particular impatinet taxi driver behind him, who could not overtake him because of traffic on the other lane. At some point he manged it, pullled back in the right lane right before him and did a hard brake (to annoy him I guess - or he had a death wish).
Well 3 tons of concrete and another ton of steel do not just stop. So he got a free ride for about 100 meters on the bonnet of a very pissed and shocked truck driver. He was unharmed but my friend had a very very deep urge to change that.
Don't ask me what I have seen on the Autobahns. No speed limit is not a good thing if you ask me.
Oh ho! I see!
Now, on to my bad driving story! I used to have to go down CO-43 to work. It's a two lane highway that goes between Golden, CO and Boulder, CO. Anyway, it has a reputation for being rather hazardous to drive in, which it rightfully deserves, most of the time. This is also Colorado, which has a completely untrue reputation for being a snowy state. And you also have fuck tons of Californication, so there are a lot of drivers from states that rarely if ever see any sort of snow.
Now, combine out-of-state drivers utterly unprepared for snow driving living in a state that has a reputation for have incredibly bad winter weather but doesn't actually have winter weather that bad so they don't get practice driving on a road that has a reputation for being treacherous in bad weather and you get people who FREAK THE FUCK OUT AT THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF SNOW.
One time, it had snowed a very tiny bit (less than an inch). So, I got up early and started heading to work expecting drivers who didn't know what they were doing. Unfortunately, on this fine day, I had the fine luck of being behind the Platonic form of driver that freaks the fuck out if there's anything remotely white on the road... in a Range Rover.
My car is a FWD piece of crap. It's not great to drive in the snow, but I have the experience so I do it just fine. However, on this particular day, I didn't need any of my skills. The roads were no worse and, in some ways, better than a slightly wet road after a brief rain storm. Unfortunately, this person in the Range Rover decided to go 15 MPH the whole way. This is a one-lane highway and there are almost no good places to pass due to timing issues. This commute, at normal speed, took me about 30 minutes. On a really snowy day, it takes about 45 minutes. On this day, it took 1.5 hours. WTF? I wanted to kill that person in the Range Rover soooooo hard.
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That's just plain stupid. Even if there is only one car around every hour.
I had a car parked on the right lane of a freeway (in a curve of all things) while driving at night and it gave me like 2 seconds to react -wayy too close for comfort. Now imagine that thing moving.
It always amazes me how many people will jump into the space before a loaded tractor/trailer while approaching a red light, somehow assuming that a vehicle with 7 axles and 22 tires has the same stopping distance as a Civic.
They think they are immortal in their little tin can. Why? Beats me.
Yeah I know, but this is way back in the backwoods so it's not like there's ever a lot of traffic. Still stupid though.
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I think you mean CO-93, actually. ;-)
I've driven it though, and there's a few dangerous hilly points. Then again, there's a few long straight stretches that people like to suddenly reverse direction on though, too. (With snow, generally.)
Not that anyone should drive faster than they feel comfortable driving (especially in an unfamiliar scenario), of course. I'm sure it takes a lot of getting used to. The polite thing to do, though, is to pull over to the side of the road when you find a wide spot, and resume your crawl up (or down) the mountain when the six guys trailing you have passed.
Though the worst I've ever been was not in the mountains, but going to the Needles to climb in South Dakota. There was this long crazy winding road and the guy that was driving was so obsessed about keeping up with my friend's car ahead of us. The driver was just all over the place and I very nearly got sick.
But I remember having that death grip on my steering wheel the first time I drove down I-25. Not because of the mountains of course, but because it was rush hour.
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Europe has the good idea of having guard rails on 'crazy drop off' roads that go down to the actual road surface. I was driving through a pass once and came upon a big old traffic jam. As I crept by the flashing lights of the State Trooper I saw where a motorcycle had skid/slid across the road and into the guardrail. And on the underside of the rail was a nice smear of blood and hair. Can't help but assume that the guy went under the rail and over the edge, ugh.
Also, never take a cab in Egypt. My dad learned this the hard way. Next thing he knew, he was speeding along the breakdown lane of the highway on the opposing side.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ0coIRu_zQ
What the fuck are these people doing that they randomly loose control like that? o_O
"The tunnel runs under the Yauza River, and water leaks in at some points. The temperature can reach as low as −38 degrees Celsius (as during the winter of 2005), causing the the water on the road's surface to freeze."
"It has been nicknamed "The Tunnel of Death" due to its high accident rate and a video circulating around the Internet compiling footage of vehicle accidents recorded by monitoring cameras."
Typically its speed. The faster you're going the more that you're likely to get air under your car(or rather, you get more air under your car). When you get air under your car and it builds up, instead of your car's shape/weight pushing you onto the ground it starts to lift you off of the ground. Most cars are shaped similar to wings and only are held onto the ground by spoilers and various other downforce adding mechanisms the more air under the car the easier it is for them to fail or be counteracted.
Anyway as you go faster your steering gets a lot lighter because of this, and any movement is likely to cause larger than expected movements than you want. Think of the first time you drove a car with a joypad in a video game. The car would always go too far because you were always hitting the key too long. The same thing happens, a small turn on the wheel, and the now light car springs into action, weight shifts to the wheel that is doing the turning (outside front) which slows that wheel down relative to the rest. This pulls the (already light due to the speed) back end around even farther accentuating the turn and making the car harder to handle.
O.K. now you're in a hard turn that occurred suddenly and its time to correct. Oh, and you have to do it before you hit the guard rail, and you may or may not still have traction.
edit: Going over the video again, it seems that only two were definitively not caused by too high speeds. (two you can't tell, the rest are pretty clearly caused by too high speeds). These are the jack knifing public bus and the one at the end.
With the bus i've no clue how it happened(but it doesn't look like speed to me since the cars behind it were just starting to come up on it, or if it was it was way off camera), but that driver is quite good for keeping that thing from flipping or plowing into a wall.
For the other, a similar thing happened. Someone merged in front of the vehicle. The crash victim braked hard and then realizing he was going to rear end the other one anyway, tried to swerve. Braking shifts the weight to the front, turning to the outside, turn becomes more than he expects and then he over corrects into the wall.
He rolls his windows down as well and pops in a CD just before telling us to "Cover your ears, guys." At that moment, Somwhere Over the Rainbow starts blaring out of his speakers. Judy Garland's voice basically drowns out the other car's horrible club tunes so fast that it made my head spin. The other car quickly turns down its music, and in-turn we respond likewise. Our point was made.
Strangely enough, to this day I have no idea why he kept a Wizard of Oz CD in his glove compartment.
My parents sent me to a driving school when I was 16. The first time my instructor had me drive, it was on the interstate. Previous to this I had only driven a few times with my parents in an empty parking lot. This guy knew this and still forced me on. How we survived I'll never know. I do know at the first sign of an exit he was screaming for me to get off.
He ended up failing me, but marked passed on my sheet so I ended up getting my license anyways (because I went to a driving school I didn't have to take a test with a DMV instructor).
This. They really need to get on that. Personally, I really don't enjoy having to fear for my life every time I pass a truck on a two-lane autobahn just because I'm only going 170 km/h (Google says approx. 105 mph).
Way too many retards insisting on going like 240+ km/h. At night.
Also, it's kind of scary reading how easy it apparently is to get a driver's license in some parts of the states. That certainly helps explain some of the videos posted in this thread.
Never had to take driving classes, no courses required. Hence why most Georgia natives are flipping retards behind the wheel... fortunately my Dad is a harsh teacher and I've learned well.
I only lose traction when I want to, now. >.>
I've got absolutely no problem with that as long as you do it when
a) there isn't a whole lot of traffic
b) you can actually see the road
and
c) there are more than two lanes.
Nothing wrong with going fast as long as you don't endanger others. Since most people don't seem capable of that, I'm very much in favor of speed limits on the Autobahn. Just don't make them as low as most other European countries. 130 km/h is a joke.
Oh, and Aurin: That really is fucking scary. Is it usually that easy in the rest of the USA (or most of it) as well? I can't seem to find a decent list comparing the individual states.
Although, to be fair, it's not like our stricter standards prevent any of the idiots from getting a license. Hell, most people around here seem incapable of recognizing that not every somewhat narrow road automatically has a 30 km/h speed limit. So I'm stuck behind some idiot going 20 km/h below the speed limit just about every day.
1. Other drivers
2. Road conditions
3. Shit weather
RUN, DON'T WALK!
Because if you are only walking, you will get murdered. Every month there is another pedestrian accident in my area and that is just at the train stations. I imagine it has to do largely with pedestrians being the same oblivious assholes who tend to be behind the wheel. But for fuck's sake, go easy on them - they are made of flesh.
BUT I'VE GOT SOMEWHERE TO BE!
Everyone in Jersey is the asshole at some point. Everyone. No matter what. Myself included. I will, for reasons I can justify at the time, speed and squeeze through lights I didn't really make because "I've got somewhere to be." Which is a lie. I never have anywhere to be. I always leave early for everything I need to get to and my lifestyle doesn't lend itself to pressing engagements. It's just that we can get away with it because there are so damn many of us. And if there weren't so damn many of us, we might not feel like we had to. I envy the guy who says "fuck it" and just drives the shoulder past the traffic and while I may never commit to the role as much as that guy does, I know I'm just as guilty of being a self-centered twit as that man.
DID I MENTION THE RACING?!
I went to school in rural Maryland and I would see some amount of racing. But these were always along roads in the middle of farms. Sure, it is still stupid and dangerous but the number of people potentially hurt was pretty low. The stupidity necessary to want to race through Metropark at 8 on a Friday night is frightening.
Either it's a ghost truck that came out of the wall, or a truck from a parallel dimension moved into ours and tried to occupy the same space as the first one.
It wasn't a Porsche and it certainly wasn't 235, but I remember going down to France via Germany once.
Suddenly we see the spoiler thingie on the roof of a truck in front of us rip loose and fly up in the air, narrowly missing our car and landing behind us.
We stopped at the first available spot to get clean underwear.
The first was this brilliant guy who decided to go down on his girlfriend while he was driving during a thunderstorm. He had leaned over to perform the act and thus drove right off the road down a thirty foot embankment into a tree. Since there was a chance for a major spinal injury, we went really slowly getting him out, took about an hour the whole of which his face was buried in his gf's crotch. Luckily neither suffered a permanent injury.
The second was this kid learning to drive with his dad. I guess they had stopped at a 7-11 before driving and the kid had set his big gulp on the armrest while driving and it ended up falling into the back seat. So the kid turns around to get it, forgetting that he is behind the wheel of a moving vehicle and he ends up steering the car into a tree. The kid seemed more shaken up than anything, although he did have a broken arm but while we were working on the kid, the dad was sitting on the curb muttering to himself "I should have let his mother teach him, I should have let his mother teach him" over and over. At random intervals he would laugh, shake his head and say "it's my fault for not letting his mother teach him".
Not sure, really, but I do know that in Arizona my license lasts for like... 40 or 50 years. Hence why we have old retirees out here driving like blind morons. >.>
Edit: Actually, I take that back. Most of the 80+ crowd drives fine. They just don't do the speed limit, which pisses off the younger idiots, hence making things more dangerous.
The worst thing I've had happen here is some guy trying to merge on top of my Camaro with his truck. x_x
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To be fair, this gets less true the further away from NYC you get. In rural Jersey the driving isnt that bad.
I had an awesome driving experience recently: driving 4 hours from upstate new york into NYC in a 14' uhaul, on two hours sleep, approaching the GW bridge and realizing the uhaul was almost out of gas and I had to pee like a motherfucker. Nothing scarier than the idea of running out of gas on the GW bridge with a full bladder.
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Yeah. That's what I said. <.<
Anyway, yeah, it can get bad in truly bad weather. This wasn't bad at all. It made me cry.