As a Texan, I’m permitted to say that. On a business trip back to my home state. Land in Dallas and it’s snowing. Not much. It is just a dusting with slight accumulation on the shoulders. Where I currently live, the only change to normal driving conditions would be to slow down a bit and leave more room between you and the car ahead of you. Similar to if it was raining hard.
Do the Dallas drivers do that? No, they slow down to about 20-30 mph on the interstate while continuing to drive bumper to bumper. About 1/4 of them have their flashers on…I guess to let others know that it’s snowing. They also are very fearful of overpasses and the potential for slick spots. So many of them hit their brakes when going over overpasses. I passed 5 different multi car pile-ups because of this very behavior. My 90 minute drive from the airport took me 3 hours.
As much as I love my home state, I’ll be ready to go home tomorrow.
I don’t understand this. So they are driving, and up ahead, a street dives below the freeway so you’re on an overpass. And they hit their brakes? Are they afraid they’ll slide off to the side and fly off the freeway?
Not necessarily straight, intersections of highways tend to have high, curved overpasses for people going from one highway to the other.
Here’s an image of the High 5, it’s probably the biggest one in the area (which is why it has a name), but smaller variants are at almost any significant highway intersection
I have to be honest that we are so far away from Texas that when you see a Texas plate, You Just Know That Its Stolen. I can’t say that Texas drivers are bad, but I can say that… Car Thieves? They Full-Tongue Suck Ass…!
I was raised in Kentucky where it’s hilly and often snows. Learnt to deal with it.
Moved to Clovis NM which is near the Texas border and very flat. Even a minor rain storm would cause wrecks. Of course roads are slippery after a long dry spell from oil and such but, still, it was nuts.
Ice and snow? It was better than a demolition derby. Cars and pickup trucks would suddenly be doing 360’s for no obvious reason.
I was raised in Kentucky where it’s hilly and often snows. Learnt to deal with it.
Moved to Clovis NM which is near the Texas border and very flat. Even a minor rain storm would cause wrecks. Of course roads are slippery after a long dry spell from oil and such but, still, it was nuts.
Ice and snow? It was better than a demolition derby. Cars and pickup trucks would suddenly be doing 360’s for no obvious reason.
Ice. The increased airflow below the road (and TxDOT’s demonstrated incompetence at salting/sanding roads in the Metroplex) means you’re more likely to have ice on a bridge/overpass/giant swoopy ramp. That does not mean that you should hit the brakes though. The last time I was in DFW during one of their ice spells, I took great pains to avoid any elevated stretches of road. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get into Dallas from Houston without crossing that 8 mile-ish stretch over the Trinity on 45… I was driving at, IIRC, 5-10 MPH, going as straight as I could and trying not to touch any of the brakes, gas, or steering wheel, and I could still hear cars around me sliding. Damned thing was a skating rink.
Tailgating at 25 mph, like Omar mentions the locals were doing, is pretty damned stupid. I just accept that Southerners don’t do ice and snow all that well and I try to avoid driving when it happens. God help Houston if we ever got ice like Dallas.
I bitched several times today about exactly the behavior Omar is talking about. It’s not so much that people were slowing down for bridges and overpasses; that wouldn’t be unreasonable. No, they were waiting until they got on the bridge, then hitting the brakes–one of the worst things you can do if it happens to be icy, and pointless if it isn’t.
It’s not like I’m an expert on driving on snow and ice–I’m a Southerner, too, after all–but we get enough ice storms that you’d think people would learn the basics.
Oh, no. Texans act like this even if the wet-stuff-fall-from-sky isn’t frozen. It’s a near-even mix of:
“I don’t recognize this phenomenon, so I’ll just drive normally.” (Where “normally” means “like a bat out of Hell, assuming the bat is drunk and suffering from testosterone poisoning”.)
and
“Gods angry! Me afraid! Me drive 3 miles per hour, not catch their eye!”
There are sane Texans, who know what to do in these situations. Since the correct course of action is staying off the roads (and away from the idiots) as much as possible, you don’t hear much about them.
Being from Buffalo we learn to drive in anything the sky can drop. My friend was once a truck driver and has logged thousands of miles on a motorcycle. So a little more experience than average.
2 years ago he was in Dallas during an ice storm. Said it’s about the only time in his life he was scared while driving.
I saw a new flavor of idiot on my way home last night. I worked late and it turned out to be a smart thing because the worst of the traffic was over by then.
On I-30, just west of downtown Fort Worth, I saw brake lights ahead so I let off the gas. Then I saw a pickup get a little sideways when he had to come to a complete stop. Then I saw why he had to come to a complete stop. The idiot in front of him stopped, opened his door in front of an oncoming car in the left lane (who nearly wiped out when he swerved to miss the door) and got out and walked around to the rear of his car, shaking his fist and yelling at every car around him.
I managed to downshift and brake and come to a stop in a straight line on the sheet of ice on the Trinity River bridge.
Then the idiot got back in his care and sped off. Then about a mile later, on the flyover ramp to I-35, I see another car stopped at the apex where it splits to go north or south on I-35. I see the driver get out of his car - and it’s the same idiot. He walks around his car as I drive past him. Fortunately, I didn’t see him again.
For those of you not familiar with the area, that apex is about 100 feet off the ground. TXDOT had sanded the ramp, but it’s not a good idea to get out of your car and walk around in traffic on a sunny day when you’re 100 feet off the ground, much less on an icy night.
Out here in California, a car with Texas plates almost ran me off the road! The driver and front - seat passenger sat there like statues in the car; they were wearing Texas style hats. In the car. Morons. :mad:
I wouldn’t even know where to get tire chains in Dallas, much less want to have them in the car for the once every few years when they might actually be needed.
A lot of the problem Friday was that it was a bit of a surprise–when I went to bed Thursday night, reports were still that the snow would come in late Friday night. It actually started where I am at about 9:30 am–so a lot of people that would normally have stayed home were already at school/work when it started.
Don’t feel bad, yesterday on the way home from work at about noonish, I got stuck on a two-lane residential road behind some clown who had his hazard flashers on and was going 10(!) mph at the most. It’s like this clown though that the sheen of water on the road was BLACK ICE!!! or something equally cretinous.
Then, when I finally got out from behind Nervous Nellie, I ran into his polar opposite- some ass going way too fast (like 50), and weaving in and out of slow traffic, changing lanes and weaving on bridges, which were actually plenty icy.
