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...Especially when [Driving] a maniacal Toon vehicle.
The Ender
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUwrp4zyPCASo: when did you see that something was wrong on the road? In time to react?
The first time I saw that video, I saw the truck at about the same time the white vehicle's brake lights lit up - and as a passive viewer watching a video with foreknowledge that there would be a collision in it, I had a pretty big advantage over any of the drivers in that footage.
How many times have you casually just pressed the accelerator and moved to pass a transport truck like the red one in that video. What do you think would've happened to the car with the camera on the dash if it had been midway through trying to pass the red truck when the driver realized what was happening in the oncoming lane?
Let's talk about road safety & taking the activity of driving seriously, because - in my experience - most people are incredibly unsafe on the road, and don't take anything they do while operating a vehicle seriously (particularly when it comes to pressing the accelerator).
I drive at the speed limit all of the time! Well, most of the time; sometimes I slip up, or that damn government changes the maximum speed right when you aren't expecting it so they can get that juicy road fine revenue!
Did you know that almost every municipality has an agreement like this one to re-invest any traffic fine monies into road maintenance, so nobody is getting a 'cut' of all that horrible 'cash cow' that bad drivers like to talk about to deflect conversations away from their terrible driving?
Did you also know that a Maximum Speed sign is not a 'recommendation' for how fast you should go, but an absolute maximum safe limit, under ideal conditions, at which you can drive on the road? And this limit is not pulled out of the air by your local fat cat politician that you may or may not like to blame for all of the stupid things you do that get you into legal trouble - it's imposed by the engineers that built the Goddamn road.
You should almost never drive right 'around' the maximum legal speed of a road - especially if the legal speed is at or above 100 mph. In fact, you should never approach 100 mph when driving, ever, unless someone is, say, you have a life or death emergency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8E5dUnLmh4Look at that yellow car at the 0:18~ second mark, and try telling me with a straight face that your seatbelt or airbag would make a life saving difference if you were driving that vehicle in that kind of collision. Then go back to the first video, if you need to, and consider how little reaction time & actual braking time you have when something unexpected happens on the road.
Driving at the limit is a bad idea, and if you do it, you should stop.
Pfft. OP, you don't even know. I have a secret driving power that lifts me above the rabble - it's called 'driving while shitfaced'. It makes me a better driver. No, seriously. No, for real, I totally drive awesome while I am drunk!
Apparently a lot of people also believe that they have this secret power, because a lot of motorists still drive while drunk, causing about 30 vehicle accident fatalities every day in the United States.
No, you do not drive better while drunk. No, the fact that you didn't plan your evening out isn't a compelling excuse, and I imagine Sam Kinison had a few regrets about his comedy routine during the few minutes he was still barely alive after being killed by the world's most cruelly ironic impaired driver.
I'm no Sunday Driver, OP; I'm a pro. I'm a former stunt driver (or may as well be)! I go out to practice what I call defensive driving on the track every weekend. My car & I are like an extension of each other, so I can drive however fast I want and still be safe because I have the skills. The world is my great orange pylon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77MoOl5o5aMHumans aren't very good at intuiting energy on the scale that even 'slow' vehicles drive at; you're never as 'in control' of your vehicle as you think you are, regardless of your level of driving skill. What you think of as inconsequential (like shaving 5 km/h off of your cruising speed) is easily the difference between a fatal or non-fatal collision, because the scale that we measure vehicle speeds on doesn't effectively capture how much force is changed with a -5 or +5 (much less -20 or +20) adjustment.
Man I can't schedule worth a Goddamn, and I have to get places fast to make up for it. I don't have time for this 'road safety' bullshit; Hell, I'm mostly just pissed-off that they installed these stupid 'governors' in my car. I've had it up to HERE with people trying to govern me - I don't need my car doing it too!
Have you ever found yourself raging at traffic lights because they always seem to be red when you're trying to race around town? That's actually by design (well, the part where you can't just zip around town). For the most part, when you're in a town or city, the rate at which you can get from one place to another is dictated by traffic signals - not by the performance of your vehicle. If you`re late getting to work while going 40 between signal stops, you`re not going to do much better when going 80 between signal stops (assuming you can even `fight traffic`-I believe that`s the term bad drivers use these days - to get going that quick to begin with.
Of course, you could always just cheat the signals, I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euCBP9uSzKsSo, driving. You`re bad at it, but hey, it`s the government`s fault, am I right?
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- West Texas has crazy speed limits, because it takes so long to get anywhere. A trip to go get groceries at your nearest supermarket may be 80 miles in each direction. Hence, the speed limit is now 80 mph.
- I wish BMW would take this car to production:
It was surprisingly sane and safe. Of course the idiots in their suped up pickup trucks drove way too fast for their ability and vehicle performance, but they do that regardless what the signs say.
I agree with the OP on everything except the part of who decides what the speed limits will be. Maybe in Europe they listen to engineers for safety reasons, but not so here in the USofA. Just google "Minneapolis Bridge Collapse" if you are curious how we listen and appreciate expert opinions when safety and tax dollars collide.
Also, I accelerate past slow moving large vehicles even if it pushes me pastthe speed limit because of situations depicted in the first video. I was taught to always have escape routes planned no matter where you are on the road and not to be boxed in by a semitruck and retaining wall. I start to feel claustrophobic in that situation and if I can pass I will, if I can't due to traffic then I slow down and settle in behind the other vehicles and enjoy some music while the traffic jam eases on.
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This is me, basically. I only use the left lane to pass people (especially semis or bigger trucks) and otherwise, I generally drive the speed limit or, at most, 5 over.
I stay away from everyone on the road if at all possible. I don't ride people to closely and I try not to let anyone do the same to me. If anyone is directly beside me, I either slow down or speed up to get away from them. This is to protect me if they have an accident and to protect them if I have one. Roads are full of tons and tons of metal going very, very fast and you can easily die or be seriously injured, even if someone does something so minute as jerk their wheel in the wrong direction for a split second.
So, basically, I get to where I'm going as far away from everyone else as I can be while driving safely myself. I check all 3 of my mirrors constantly while I'm driving and it's saved me from a few bad situations in my life.
Also, the left lane on the highway is for passing, jerks. Don't hang out in it going the minimum and staying with the flow of traffic. Pass or gtfo!
You can die
You can kill someone else
You can seriously and permanently injure yourself or someone else
You can cause massive amounts of property and vehicle damage
You can go to jail for driving
These things happen to people every single day and as much as you want to believe otherwise, you are no special flower. Be respectful of the roads for not only your sake, but for everyone else out there too. You aren't going to make up as much time as you think by blowing by everyone going 140 or 150 km/h on the highways. Slow down, plan your trips better and get there safely. And for the love of god, use your damn turn signals. It's not really that hard to do people.
There is a show up here called Canada's Worst Driver that I started watching a few years ago and it changed how I think about driving. The show is simultaneously the funniest and most terrifying show on TV in my opinion. It is hilarious to watch how inept these people are when they drive, but then you come to the frightening realization that these are actual people driving on the same roads we use every day. And there are a ton more people just like them who aren't on TV. The only thing you can control when you are driving is yourself, so do everyone a favour and drive in a way that minimizes the chance of something awful happening to you. Please don't speed, please obey the signs, please don't text or talk on your cell and please, please, please never drive drunk.
I know I sound like the annoying, no-fun type of person now, but this is something that is much more serious than people realize. It annoys me whenever I hear people seemingly justify or be proud of their poor driving habits. We should all be striving for safer roads, not with the things you can get away with.
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Even a sanctioned drag strip is more fun than racing in the streets, in my opinion.
But I have had zero accidents in 15 years due to my driving. I was rear-ended once, but that wasn't because of me.
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Not necessarily true in the US. Example: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2011/10/19/town-that-lived-off-speeding-tickets
Again, not really true. At least in the US.
US speed limits are based around a concept called 85th percentile speed. Basically, if 85% of drivers on a road drive at or below X speed, then X should be the speed limit.
When a new road is built, the speed limit is set at a number based on the observations of drivers on similar roads. It's effectively a prediction of social behavior.
Here are a couple of articles explaining it:
http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/szn/determining_the_85th_percentile_speed.htm
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/comparison-zoning
On most roads, drivers ignore speed limits, and changing a speed limit does not significantly affect driver behavior (unless there are police officers visibly enforcing the speed limit or other speed-limiting measures are used such as speed bumps):
http://www.cabobike.org/2010/01/30/ask-the-traffic-engineer-how-are-speed-limits-set/
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
Predictably, changing posted speed limits does not typically alter the number of accidents on a road (also from http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html) because changing posted speed limits doesn't significantly alter driver behavior.
Driving too fast causes accidents.
However, "too fast" in this sense does not mean "too fast relative to the speed limit." It means "too fast relative to other drivers." When transportation departments do studies on the relationship between accidents and speed, they find that accident rates increase the further away from the mean or median speed you get. Example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505001247
So if you're driving on a road with other cars around you, ideally you should be driving at the average speed. If you're alone on a road, you should be driving under the posted speed limits because, in general, posted speed limits are an indication of what the average speed is on that road when it is populated.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And I can tell you for a fact that the 35mph speed limit on long, straight roads in the countryside is not set because that's the fastest you can safely drive.
Is this the new car thread or is it about general driving anecdotes? I can't really parse a goal from the OP.
I disagree: 'too fast' means 'if you collide with something at this speed, or lose control of your vehicle at this speed, you will probably be involved in a fatal accident'.
Collisions occur at wide range of speeds, and yes, collision rates increase as drivers stray from the median. Fatal collisions, overwhelmingly, involve (a) vehicle(s) traveling at high speed, and very rarely involve (a) vehicle(s) that were traveling 'too slowly'.
Link.
Which isn't necessarily defined by the posted speed limit.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Driving is also depressing to think about. People do this every day, multiple times, yet they remain abysmal drivers. How is that even possible?
And today was the first day in so many years that I had to slam on the breaks and have ABS kick in. I actually almost hit the truck in front of me. I'm glad I had some distance between us, and the guy behind me was dilly-dallying like an ass back there a quarter mile away.
I must admit, I do lose a little more faith in humanity every time I give a signal to change lanes and the person in that lane speeds up to make sure I don't get in front of them.
Although, I did have one of my grade-school teachers proudly tell me that he had never used the signal lights on his truck.
This pervasive myth among bad drivers is wrong. No link is known to actually exist between accident rates or fatal accidents and people driving extremely slowly. On the other hand, as shown in the same study, increasing your speed to pass all of those 'slow, unpredictable road hazards' does increase both accident rates and fatal collisions.
I just posted a link demonstrating a causal link between posted speed limit increases and fatal car collisions (double the fatalities after raising the limit from 55 to 65 mph).
EDIT:
If everyone is doing it, it must be safe!
Just going with the flow of traffic. Who cares about my actual speed?
I think you're being a bit simplistic. I deliberately used a few hedge words in my post like "on most roads" and "typically" because the relationship of traffic engineering on driver behavior is complicated. I stand by my post, though: altering speed limits on most roads does not significantly change the behavior of drivers without additional supportive measures (like visible enforcement).
The article I posted, BTW, wasn't some random bozo. It was chartered by the US Federal Highway Administration and it's informed the policies of the federal Department of Transportation and state departments of transportation (examples: http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist05/traffic/Realistic-Speed-Zoning.PDF and http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa12004/fhwasa12004.pdf). It was a systematic look at speed limit changes across different roadway types in different regions. You can't really point to an ecological study that looks at one type of road in one region, finds a difference in the number of fatal accidents, infer from it that average driver speed changed, and then claim that the article I posted (or the conclusion I drew from it) was "flat-out wrong." That's just a few too many small leaps in logic.
At best, you've shown that over time speed limit changes on rural highways are associated with some people driving faster. That's reasonable - first off, a disproportionately smaller number of drivers are responsible for fatal accidents, so it only takes a relatively small number of outliers to cause a spike in accident rates. Second, people tend to set their driving speed based on where they feel comfortable (I acknowledge that a person may feel comfortable driving at a speed that is in fact unsafe); I'll concede that on a boring country road with few visual safety cues and very few other drivers, posted speed limits would have more effect than on a more populated road.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We have a bunch of them in Massachusetts (we call them rotaries) although not like they have in the UK where there basically is no such thing as a 4 way intersection. They are very unpopular with nonnatives.
Fun fact#1: Adult Massachusetts drivers scored third worst on the written drivers ed test.
Fun fact#2: Massachusetts has the lowest automobile fatality rate of any state.
Conclusion?
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I've had this problem, as I'm sure most have. A solution I'm increasingly willing to try? Slam on my brakes and let the tail gating pricks rear end me.
Only thing keeping me from doing it is fear they have children on board.
Slow road speed absolutely is associated with increased incidence of accidents, as is fast road speed. The majority of all crashes occur when at least one driver is traveling either 15mph slower or 15mph faster than the mean road speed (images borrowed from a report prepared for the Arizona DOT):
However, accident fatalities are more common at high speed:
That said, I used the phrase "slow road speed" to differentiate it from "driving too slow." The reasons somebody may have a slow road speed are numerous - bad weather conditions, or they may have been reacting to an animal or pedestrian that other drivers didn't see, for instance.
"Driving too slow" brings up a mental stereotype of an old lady in her Corolla puttering along at 45mph on an interstate freeway, and I don't mean to suggest that a majority of slow-road-speed accidents fit that stereotype.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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One of my biggest pet peeves is people who don't signal. I always drive 10-15mph above the speed limit, but I always always signal so the person ahead, behind, or next to me knows that I'm going to pass or go around them. I even signal if I'm the only person on the road, especially at night in case there's a pedestrian or other driver I cant see.
There have been too many times on the road where I've seen or narrowly escaped accidents because someone didn't signal when changing lanes. Last week I had someone nearly hit me in the drivers side door at 70mph when they decided to change into my lane when I was right next to them and had been driving next to them for at least 30 seconds. Luckily, I had room to swerve out of the way, but ended up having to accelerate and go around them because I had to swerve into a lane heading towards an exit to avoid them.
I also rarely honk because it takes me a lot less time and thought to flash a person than it does to honk. My hands go to the headlight/brights/turn signal stalk much faster than having to move my entire hand to hit the center of my wheel to honk. Plus, I am able to keep both hands on the wheel while making whatever evasive maneuvers I need to in order to avoid the other driver.
Some background for the non-Californians: in California, the leftmost lane of a freeway isn't just a passing lane. People cruise in it.
I was in the leftmost lane when traffic suddenly got dense and I heard sirens. I looked in my mirror, and there was a fire truck coming up along the left shoulder with its lights on. Okay, there's obviously an accident up ahead, so I signaled and moved over two lanes. So did everybody else in the leftmost lane.
So now the leftmost lane is clear for the fire truck. The fire truck scoots by, followed a few car lengths behind by a car with a civilian plate using the freshly-cleared lane to jump ahead of traffic. No bueno!
Then another car in the second lane decides - hey, that's a great idea! I want to follow the fire truck too! And pulls into the leftmost lane, immediately behind the fire truck but in front of the first car, which causes a rear-end accident.
:rotate:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm bad about signaling if there's nobody else on the road. It's something I'm trying to improve.
I'm pretty good about signaling when I'm changing lanes or turning through traffic.
What always makes me laugh are people who start to change lanes and then signal like it was an afterthought.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
On Long Island, the drivers are not always intelligent enough to know which direction to move when an emergency vehicle is approaching from behind. Our left lanes are also not strictly passing lanes, and considering traffic it's often more expedient for police/ambulances to cruise along the right lane/shoulder. I always get a chuckle when a state trooper gets on the loudspeaker and orders an inattentive numbskull out of the way, usually in the most condescending manner possible.
I live in Southern California and there are very few roundabouts here as well, but I have noticed that all the roundabouts we do have make what you saw impossible - we put shit in the middle. Be it a fountain or trees (or just bushes), its super hard to just plow right through it and make a left.
4-way intersections most definitely have their place though. In super congested areas I think its better to have 4 way lights since dealing with roundabouts like some of the ones in Paris is a fucking nightmare. 8 lane roundabout? Fuck that noise and put in some god damn stop lights.
Ive noticed since buying a not-sporty car (4 door Civic) Ive tended to drive at the speed limit, down from my previous 5-15 over. Partially because Im not in a sporty car so driving fast isnt as fun, partially because the car Im driving is worse at driving fast, and partially because I want to maximize my gas milage (which is the new game I play in my car) but still get to places on time. It helps that the weather is pretty constant (sunny 70-80f, although its like 50-60f in the winter December-January). Shit gets hairy when it rains though. Assholes just dont know how to drive in it.
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
I do a bit of AutoX and I wouldn't say it gives me the right to drive faster or anything of that nature. I do, however, think everyone should be required to take some sort of evasive driving class. I feel a bit more confident on the road in my car because I have practiced with my car at the limit and I have a better idea what it is going to do when I crank the wheel at 40mph or how fast I can stop when I stab the brakes in dry conditions or wet conditions. The important part of this is the person practices with the car they will be driving with on the road. The things you learn will be a lot less transferable if you practice with some compact car and then drive an SUV as your daily driver.
This sort of training is not going to make you a super human at driving or intuiting energy levels, but it is better than absolutely no practice at all.
_______
On another topic, if you are a passenger do you ever comment to the driver if they are driving badly? I used to try and just keep quiet and let them drive, but these days I try and politely point out if they are doing something unsafe because, well, it is a safety concern.
You gotta put something permanent in the middle, though. In my anecdote, it wasn't an open roundabout, the guy drove over a small median with a hedge because the roundabout just broke his fucking brain.
Actually, England has a unique solution to this problem: Inception-esque roundabouts within roundabouts, where several smaller roundabouts lead into larger center roundabouts to direct a heavier flow of traffic.
Was this in Texas?
Was he in a pickup truck?
Did he signal?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes. Yes. No.
The markups on those signal lights are killer, mang. Those things should come standard.
Yeah, now that I give it greater thought I think most of them have other stuff in there - raised curb of course, typically either a raised (typically with plants and stuff) or depressed center (with rocks and stuff, not boulders think paving stone esque).
Okay, that sounds very interesting and now Im going to spend like 40 minutes on Google maps trying to find one.
My sister isnt a very good driver. I guess shes not horrible, but she definitely drives poorly and she gets worse when I comment on her driving. I now basically resort to suggesting I drive.
Double posting because I think this seques into getting elderly family members to stop driving. My grandmother probably shouldnt be driving at night, and for the most part she doesnt, but Im kind of at a loss on how to stop her. She lives on her own and is really independent, but I fear for her safety and the safety of others when shes on the road at night.