Another Bay Area driving rant.
Twice in three days I’ve been behind people in the center or left lanes who decide at the last minute to exit the freeway, and cut across multiple lanes of traffic to do so. On Wednesday I was the victim. I noticed just in time what the clown was doing. He managed to see me also, and missed the exit ( ) and got off at the next one. I hope it took him half an hour to go the right way.
Yesterday another idiot did the same thing, cutting right in front of the car in front of me. The right lanes weren’t even crowded. The exits are well marked, so there is no excuse. In neither case was anyone even exiting, so I’m not doing a cut in front of the line pit. This is purely a stop making dangerous maneuvers because you can’t plan ahead pit.
While I’m at it, I’ll also pit carpoolers who wait until just before the exit to get out of the car pool lane in heavy traffic. I don’t mind car pool lanes at all, but they can plan ahead, and not consider it their Og-given right to have a path cleared for them to the exit. They might have to travel a bit more slowly for half a mile - boo-hoo.
I’m just waiting for one of these fools to lose control and wipe themselves out. I’ll call 911 - but I’ll be laughing at their mangled bodies while I do it.
But as a recent immigrant to the Bay Area, I would like to just voice that the signage here is for crap. If you don’t know exactly where your exit is, chances are that you will miss it because the signs are often way too close to the actual exit.
Plus, I have one point during my commute where I have 150 yards to get over four lanes where two highways are coming together.
And don’t get me started on using town names instead of directions. 92 to Hayward or Half Moon Bay doesn’t mean anything if you don’t live here. Give me east or west.
Yeah, there are places like that, (the signs for the Maze are dreadful) but not these places. There is ample signage announcing the exits, with the actual names. Anyhow, if you don’t know the exit, then you really need to be in the right lane. I don’t mind people driving a bit slowly there to check things out.
But forget east and west. Being from the East, in my mind east is to the water and west is inland, so I always need to think twice about which way I need to go. I’m a bit better after ten years - just a bit.
To continue this tangent about Bay Area signage, the thing that confuses me is the transition from north/south to east/west. In the peninsula, 101 and 280 run north/south. That’s the way I generally envision them. But in the south bay (Santa Clara, where I live, for instance), the run east/west. So one has to remember that 101 West is really North, and adjust accordingly for all streets and routes that are parallel or perpindicular.
Overall, I find the south bay and peninsula to be fairly easy places to get around, with very few one-way-streets, things-that-change-names, exits-that-work-weird-ways, etc.
I had the opposite experience the other week while driving home in the East Bay. I’m a very conservative driver, was in the right lane with my turn signal on, preparing to exit the freeway.
Glance in my passenger-side mirror and see a car zooming up on the fucking SHOULDER. This idiot goes roaring by me (young driver with young passengers and if that makes me an old fuddy-duddy at the ripe age of 36, tough), veers left across multiple lanes of traffic (meaning he cuts directly from the shoulder, across the exit, and back over towards the fast lane).
I hope you get bucket seat crabs you turd.
And yeah, those east-west north-south signs are tons of fun. I-80 runs east/west into and out of San Francisco, however get off the Bay Bridge and I-80 East heads basically North and gradually turns in a bit heading to Sacramento.
All that said if you want the suckiest highways signs I’ve ever seen, go to Columbus Ohio. It seems like half the exit signs are a few hundred yards down the highway past the actual exit.
Having lived in Florida till I was 35, I never understood why someone who crossed three-four lanes of traffic (left to right) to exit was said to be executing a “New Jersey Exit” - until, that is - I moved to NJ. Now I fully understand why they call it that.
I lived in New Jersey for fifteen years, and pretty much never saw anyone do that. Maybe some people do, when they get fooled by jughandles, New Jersey’s claim to fame.
Can I usurp this thread to rant about jerks who turn left right after the green light changes even though there are people going straight. I keep waiting for one of them to get broad-sided because they are too impatient to wait until their legal right of way.
Oh, right. I’m not up in the Oakland area often, but there’s one stretch of freeway where you’re on two freeways at once, one of them East and one of them West. It’s freaky.
Y’all know that they’re planning on widening the 238 exchange? THAT’S gonna be some fun. We already have idiots that drive in the lane right next to the interchange and wait until the last possible second to hop onto 238. Lord, I hate the idiots in the other cars. Not you guys, of course, because everybody knows that Dopers are so considerate.
I had a scary near-miss at the 238 interchange a few years ago. I was driving in the second lane from the right, and all of a sudden one of those idiots came swooping across from the right lane, right in front of me. Fortunately, I managed to jam on the brakes, but it was pretty scary.
The signs do indeed suck on a lot of the freeways in the Bay Area. I always avoid the Maze, because I can never remember if 80 or 580 goes off to the left, and my hatred for drivers who go across multiple lanes at the last second is such that I’m not going to do that. (Well, that, and that I hate driving and trying to park in San Francisco, so I almost always take BART when I’m going there)
At least now we’ve got exit numbers. We didn’t until very recently- in fact, when I was a TA at UC Santa Cruz, the topic somehow came up one day, and I had some students who had never been outside California and didn’t believe me when I said other places number their exits.
580 does go the direction it says it does in the far East Bay (Castro Valley eastward).
It’s fun to tell Midwesterners about that. You can just see the wheels in their heads going off their mountings and grinding together
My parents were freaked by the fact that, in Santa Cruz, the 1 runs east-west even though it’s labelled north or south. They said, “Well, 1 North it must run west and north, then” (it actually runs west and south through part of Santa Cruz, as it follows the coastline).
Just last Thursday I saw a goof with really questionable judgement pull off the idiotic maneuver described in the OP, miss his exit anyway, and then pull over to the shoulder and start backing up to it.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
To continue this tangent about Bay Area signage, the thing that confuses me is the transition from north/south to east/west. In the peninsula, 101 and 280 run north/south. That’s the way I generally envision them. But in the south bay (Santa Clara, where I live, for instance), the run east/west. So one has to remember that 101 West is really North, and adjust accordingly for all streets and routes that are parallel or perpindicular.[/quuote]
Until 280 is about to turn into 680, at which point it runs east west before turning into sorta northeast, southwest. Roughly. And yes, 237 is just plain nasty. I don’t know how they can say they’re improving it; I was down at McCarthy Ranch last week and got thoroughly lost at the exit and nearly sideswiped twice. I think the morning DJ’s have “And there’s an accident at Dixon Landing Road…” recorded on permanent loop.
Back to the OP…I’ve noticed this more on the Peninsula (around Mountain View specifically) than in the East Bay. Forget letting anyone in, forget getting over and spending an extra 20 seconds behind someone in an exit lane, I must be FIRST!!
) and got off at the next one. I hope it took him half an hour to go the right way.