What really burns me up is when there is a relatively small gap between me and the car in front of me and nothing for miles behind me, but the slowpoke has to pull out in front of me and make me hit my brakes instead of waiting maybe 2 seconds until I get by before he enters the roadway. I HATE when that happens!
My somewhat related annoyance is the dual speed limits on California interstates. The speed limit for cars on much of I-5 is 70, but trucks are limited to 55. The truckers mostly obey the 55 mph speed limit, because getting a ticket could cost them their job. But many car drivers seem to want to go closer to 80. I don’t want to go that fast; for me 70-75 mph is fast enough. But if I’m in the right lane I get stuck behind a bunch of slow trucks. If I move over to the left lane to pass the trucks I get tailgated by someone who thinks I’m not going fast enough. Yes, I will move over to the right lane once I’ve gotten past the trucks, but I’m not going to speed up just because someone else wants to go faster.
Yes. These entitled assholes will also proceed to drive 10-15 miles below the speed limit for miles. I hate them.
Also people driving below the speed limit in the left lane (or even at the speed limit). If people are piling up and passing you on the right, get out of the lane!
Don’t even get me started on the people who can’t (apparently) count the number of people who are in their car. Get out of the car pool lane.*
*Last week the CHP busted someone near here for driving in the car pool lane with a dummy in the passenger seat. CHP busts another dummy cheating carpool lane on Bay Area highway | KRON4 
On rural two lane roads, the drivers that infuriate me the most are the ones that slow down unnecessarily for corners and hills, but when they get to a straight flat section (like where the passing sections are) they speed up to above the speed limit. Makes me wish I had machine guns mounted to my front bumper.
What is piss-boilingly aggravating is encountering one of these slow drivers on a single carriageway A-road doing 45 mph (UK road one down from a motorway, speed limit is 60), often difficult to pass safely. The road then goes through a village or smalll town where the limit often drops to 30, and they maintain the 45mph! Saw this frequently on an A road into Edinburgh that was 37 miles long and took about 1 hr to traverse with the villages.
25% under the limit just to piss all the other drivers off, then 50% over the limit in the area where it’s most dangerous to speed and the chances of hitting a pedestrian are highest. For fucks sake.
Ah, the infamous I-5. For those of you outside of California, I-5 runs up the spine of California, with nothing on either side for hundreds of miles but fields and truck stops. It is only 2 lanes each direction and is also a major trucking route.
The difference between 70-80 MPH and 50-60 MPH can mean an hour or more of travel time between the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area.
What is particularly galling are the trucks that decide they need to make better time and decide to pass (in the left lane) the truck in front of them doing 55 MPH at 56 MPH!
And then there re the tangles of cars and trucks that seem to travel as packs at 50-60 MPH in both lanes. Threading through these packs keeps you awake, at least.
In my limited experience of only around 4 days driving, California drivers are the best I’ve seen at staying out of the passing lane unnecessarily, both cars and trucks. Those trucks that did pull out in front of me to pass another truck passed quickly and pulled back into their lane. Cars that were on my tail in the left hand lane, when I pulled over to the right, actually passed me quickly rather than boxing me in by speed matching me or not passing me quickly enough to slide behind them before I had to brake for another car like usually happens in Florida.
What the truck drivers did do in my experience was wait until the last possible deci-second to pull left. No other vehicles visible on our side on that section of I-5 other than the two trucks and myself, and the truck, several different ones in a row, put their turn signal on and started to move lanes in the exact place where I could not speed up to avoid it nor coast down to its speed without braking.
If it weren’t for the mountains off in the distance you’d almost think you were in the Midwest.
I would say that in my opinion California drivers are the best at merging, too. Someone above mentioned people who zoom past traffic in a lane that’s about to end and cut in front of the people lined up in the other lane. Here that doesn’t happen so much, because people actually use all the lanes until they end and then take turns. So there is no empty lane for people to zoom ahead in. My hypothesis is that because traffic in our cities is so congested you basically have to use all the lanes, so it becomes habit even when traffic is moving.
I tell people from other states (particularly the Northeast) that when it comes to freeways, Californians are mostly professional-level drivers (simply because of the amount of it we do - the nature of the state dictates this). Which leads to some culture shock when newcomers see us performing maneuvers at 75-80 that would only be tried below 55 in other regions.
Plus, we tend to understand merging. Indicating with the turn signal, making eye contact as you look for some space, etc. are not viewed as challenges in California (try any of those in Boston!), so merges tend to be civilized.
Why the traffic jams? The sheer number of cars on the road, that’s why. I read a factoid some years ago that the section of the 405 going past LAX was the busiest stretch of highway in the world, as measured in vehicles per hour passing by.
Drivers in Austin used to love that plan. They would go 45 in the 35 zone. When it went up to 50, they would still go 45.
I still don’t understand why people do a dummy in the car. It is obvious, probably even on camera. An infant seat or two in the back (twins are a thing), with the a sunshade pulled over it may or may not contain a human passenger, and there is no way to tell without stopping and looking. I legitimately traveled in the HOV lane lots of times where one of the passengers was a baby.
And speaking of carpool/HOV lanes. They are not a super left lane. I do not need to illegally pull out of the HOV lane into the regular left lane, just so you can pass me. To the one guy who did swerve past me on the right, did you think that maybe the reason I was going the speed limit was because of the cop waiting at that underpass up ahead? I’m sure you think it was somehow my fault you got pulled over.
I disagree with this line of thought. The prevailing speeds of traffic on that road are 55mph and 80mph. Traffic flow and safety are best when people pick one of the groups and keep a consistent speed.
Because you simply would prefer to go 70-75, your preference has now caused the remainder of the drivers to have to slow when they approach you causing an accordion effect slowing down traffic for miles and causing a safety concern with people stopping quickly and changing lanes.
As I said before, we share the road and we should follow the customs so that we can get to our destinations safely and efficiently. Respectfully, you don’t own the road and for no better reason than your preference of 70-75, you are upsetting the flow of traffic for everyone. Pick either 80 or 55 and be courteous of others.
A few observations:
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I’ve always found it funny how science and the authorities say you should go under or at the speed limit for best safety, but drivers insist the speed limit is actually the minimum speed and everyone should go 65-85 mph in a 65mph zone. The rationalizations they use to justify this are equally amusing.
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The most frequent rationalization is “flow of traffic”. There is no flow of traffic. Never seen it, it doesn’t exist, unless traffic is tight, in which case everyone HAS to go about the same speed(and it’s always well under the speed limit). The reality is that you, the average driver, are 10 mph over, some drivers are at the speed limit, and wherever you look there’s someone zipping around, changing lanes, to get past the slowpokes doing only 75. The latter drivers are the unsafe ones.
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If it’s the freeway, no one is holding you up. Go around. If it’s a city street, if they weren’t in your way it would only mean you would have reached the next red light faster. BTW, anticipating the light change and inching your car forward gains you zero time. I’ve actually seen drivers lose time, inching foward, inching foward, then the light changes and they lose a second or two anyway because the light changed just as they braked.
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Speed limits should reflect reality rather than hopes and dreams, as should minimum speeds. A predictable flow of traffic would be a great thing if it existed, and speed ranges that reflect how most drivers actually drive would be easier to enforce and probably promote better and safer traffic flow. A speed limit everyone regards as the minimum just means everyone’s speeding, some a little, some a lot.
I think #2 and #4 undercuts your argument for #1. If the “average driver” routinely goes 10mph over the speed limit, then the speed limit is far too low. As you said, like most laws, that number should reflect the maximum allowable speed the law allows you to travel. When the average person routinely violates the law, the law is wrong. The law is to regulate aberrent and anti-social conduct which violates societal norms, not as a social engineering experiment from our overlords to force us into their ideas of what society should do.
The 55mph speed limit had a large impact on widespread disregard of speed limits.
The reason why you don’t observe a “flow of traffic” is because it only takes a single driver like the prior poster or someone who says “70 mph is the speed limit, the maximum allowable speed by law, so I’ll camp out here in the fast lane and fuck those people who want to go faster because I am going fast enough.” You cannot deny the danger of the average driver who caused a pack of cars having to brake, change lanes, or sit behind him fuming and developing road rage.
The accordion effect is real. It is not just people having to slow from 80 to 70. I hit my brakes, the guy behind me hits his, each of us slowing an incremental bit less than the car in front and five miles back it is a parking lot.
The other cause of that effect is a police car. Does this mean police cars pose a public safety threat? No, it means speeders pose a public safety threat.
That goes to my point. When is the only time law abiding citizens fear seeing a police officer? When they are driving. Why? Because the laws criminalize normal driving behavior, so yes, they cause these accidents because they may enforce a law selectively against you.
Your #4 addresses this. Set speed limits according to public behavior, not from some desire to act as our better elders (and in some cases raise revenue).
That I agree with, at least as an experiment. I just worry that if the speed limit is 85 that drivers will consider that a minimum. Will people going 65 get cussed out?
and also speed limits should really be rigidly enforced in residential areas.
No. Because you want to drive ten or fifteen MPH over the speed limit, thereby increasing your risk of getting a ticket and of causing or getting caught up in an accident, doesn’t mean that I have to do so. This is true even if there are some others on the road who agree with you.
Nor do I have to drive in the middle of a pack of cars all close together and all doing 80 when there’s plenty of open road available. I don’t understand why people want to do that; one blown tire or patch of ice or somebody hitting the brakes to avoid an animal in the road and there’s danger of a multicar pileup.
Nor is there any reason why that pack of cars, given that they do exist, can’t safely (or at least as safely as being in that tight pack in the first place) pass the car doing 70 in situations in which there’s plenty of open road available. Yes, some of them will have to change lanes – horrors! That’s what the lanes are there for. If you can’t change lanes without risking accidents, you’re either going way too fast for road conditions or you’re driving way too close to other cars. And how did you get on or off that expressway in the first place without changing lanes?
If you’re in heavy traffic such that there is little or no open road available, then of course you have to go with prevailing traffic speed. As has been said, that speed is unlikely to be way over the speed limit and far more likely to be under it.
– Setting the speed limit at exactly the fastest speed to be allowed carries the difficulty that people will have to be stopped for going 1MPH or even less over the limit; and I don’t even know if speedometers are calibrated that precisely; plus which, cruise control may not calibrate that precisely; plus which, foot pressure on a gas pedal is unlikely to be continuously that precise. If enforcement’s going to be that precise, everyone will wind up having to go 5MPH under the speed limit to avoid being pulled over. It seems to fit better with human nature to give 5MPH leeway over. If the limit’s 70 but the ordinary speed of traffic is 85 and nobody’s being stopped, I agree that there’s a problem; either the limit should be raised or enforcement should be stepped up – though I wonder whether in some cases it’s a time of day and road conditions issue, that police in a given area don’t think it’s worth enforcing on a dry road in light traffic what they do want to be able to enforce in the rain and/or in heavy traffic.
Does that hold? I mean, there was a time when almost everyone thought driving at .10-.12 BAC didn’t meaningfully impact safety: buzzed driving was widely practiced and no one thought too much of it. We now understand that buzzed driving has a pretty dramatic effect on safety–and the combination of strict enforcement and raising social awareness has lead to safer roads.
I just don’t know that “it seems safe to an average driver” is conclusive proof it is safe. Look at how many people think it’s safe to text and drive.
I agree perceptions change like with alcohol. But I don’t think many drivers really think it’s safe to text and drive, or weave through traffic going much faster than the flow. They just figure, I believe, the balance of lost safety v doing whatever they feel like doing is in favor of doing whatever they like whatever they feel like doing. Which is how they generally live their lives, and often I think were raised to think. Or there just isn’t any actual thought.
I try to be as vigilant as possible on multi-lane highways who is where relative to me and reduce risk as much as possible. But I don’t think I have any ‘courtesy’ requirement to pull in behind people going 55 in the right lane to immediately let past people who want to go 80 or 90, assuming east coast highways were limit is often 65. I’ll work my way to a open spot in the right lane and then move over from the left, if I’m going >65 in the left and somebody wants to go much faster. They can wait. Again unless I judge they are a real idiot and are going to dangerously tailgate then I’ll act to reduce risk.
Out west on Interstates with limits up to 80 a lot people IME don’t exceed the limit at all, or go slower. It’s not really true AFAICS that if you make the limit 65 people go 75 but it you make it 80 they just go 90.
My car is quite fast but I seldom find it productive in terms of time and gas mileage to speed on multi-lane roads (as in more than 5-8 over the limit). I admit exceeding the limit much more on posted low speed curves on winding two lane roads. And I floor it to pass on two lane roads, car is over 100 in no time, and I only let up when I’m past the person and pulling back to the right. I go at the speed limit though in most residential areas. Around where I live I go below. If pedestrians pop out from behind delivery trucks etc on the very narrow streets you can’t absolutely count on never hitting somebody even if as careful as possible. Starting to brake from 20 mph though you probably won’t kill them, from the limit at 25 mph you might, kinetic energy varying as square of speed and all.
But the perception about buzzed driving being relatively low-risk persisted even when people were sober: it wasn’t a big deal.
My point is that you can’t say “Many, many people drive 65 on this road but the speed limit is 50. This shows that it’s safe to go 65 and the 50 is too conservative”. Many people could be wrong, or, as you say, think it worth the risk. Are you disagreeing with that?