Coming home today from a wonderful visit with my kid, his partner and their new baby, I had the great fortune of getting in a queue of drivers stuck behind a moron who was meandering along at an average of 30 kmh.
OK, I’ll admit the road we were on can be hairy, especially for those not used to driving it (and the offending car had out-of-state plates) but there were pull-offs on the road specifically to allow slower cars the chance to let us hooligans pass and continue off at the actual speed limit.
And do you think this friggin’ moron would pull off?
It’s not rocket science people. You get forewarning that a pull-off is coming up, and that it would be very nice of you to do so to let the fifteen-odd cars behind you get past so you can white-knuckle it at your preferred speed later…until another bevy of cars piles up. Rinse and repeat.
If I have even ONE car behind me I pull off the bloody road. I tend to be a more cautious driver, and if someone behind seems more familiar with the road, I let them have it…it takes all of a few seconds to let them pass.
And for the record, it was on the north journey with the cliff at the left (we drive on the LHS in Aus) so no fear of plummeting down into the ocean on the RHS.
Have you driven much overseas? Australians are just appalling drivers under most circumstances. I drove home from work today on a 3 lane freeway mostly in the left hand lane where the traffic moves faster than the right hand lane. This is usual because Aussies are incapable of using the right hand lane to pass and then move over. On the way to work I had to drive around a car that was stopped at 90 degrees across the 2 left lanes of traffic to wait to get in the queue in the right hand lane. I don’t think this was an unusual day. Not in Sydney anyway.
My non-Australian father would always bang on about how Australians are terrible drivers and I aways thought "Yeah, yeah, everything is better “back home”.
Then I went and lived in the UK for a few years. I don’t think Australians lack skill but they are inconsiderate compared to the UK.
People complaining about drivers in U.S. have never driven in rural Thailand. Many drivers here straddle the street dividing line (that’s the “safest place” :smack:!) A 2-lane highway near my home widens to 6 lanes when it passes through towns, but, due to a combination of foibles, one needs to wait until it reduces to two lanes before passing a slow driver!
Several years ago the expats where I live were required to make periodic trips to an immigration station on the other side of a mountain. Just now I Googled and see that the road was mentioned in newspaper. That newspaper article is very misleading, however. The road is fine; the curves are not treacherous — the main problem is drivers who, not content to drive in their own (slow) lane nor in the middle passing lane, come around blind curves in the farthest lane, the (slow) lane for oncoming traffic!
I can get on board with just about any rant about slow drivers. Just pull the fuck over already. You’ll feel better without everyone tailgating you! I drive a particular back road around where I live pretty often to avoid the freeway going over the mountains, and it’s a nice, relaxing drive. In CA, you’re supposed to pull over if you’re slowing down 5 cars or more, but even if it’s just on guy who is obviously willing and able to drive faster than me, I let them. I want to enjoy the ride-- that’s why I’m spending a few minutes more by not taking the freeway!! Motorcycles, too. They often come behind me, and they are almost give me a nice little hand wave when I pull over a bit to let them pass. I drive pretty fast, but I know I’m not going to drive faster the folks on motorcycles.
“So passenger A in Driver 1s car was fucking Driver 1?”
“That is correct.”
"And that’s when you decide to rear-end Driver 1?’
“I did no such thing!”
"Really? Your Mercedes emblem is 3/4 of the way through Driver 1s trunk. "
“I didn’t want to rear-end Driver 1…”
“So it was an accident…?”
“No…! I wanted to rear-end Passenger A…”
May I add an addendum to this rant (which I approve heartily of, by the way)? In my area, cops are everywhere, so about the most you can get away with is roughly >five miles over any posted speed limit. That’s where I hang out and it’s a huge improvement to our vast wasteland of elderly drivers. Until some yahoo comes barreling down on you and there’s no opportunity for you to pull over. So by the time there is, it’s almost always in conjunction with a passing space for them. What happens then if it’s wide open for them to get around? Yup, tailgate you more instead.
Why in the cornbread hell do these idiots do that? If I’m in more of a hurry than someone already breaking the law is and they’re not attempting to be my accomplice, then I sure as shit get my ass in gear the first opportunity that presents its self and take care of things. I certainly don’t make both our situations worse by just hoping they’ll do it for me. Like a frigging moron.
Here in Maine, we don’t really have “turnouts” in the sense that more mountainous states have, but roads often widen at the base of a hill to add an extra lane for slower traffic; that lane usually continues to the crest of the hill, and then slower traffic must merge back over.
Too many times, there is one idiot that is on my tail when the road widens, so I move to the slow lane to let him by. He’ll start to pass, and then decide he doesn’t actually want to go faster than I am going. Rather than doing the sensible thing, which is backing off a bit and pulling back to the right, so that the line of cars behind him can pass, he’ll usually just ride right next to my rear quarter panel the whole way up the hill, and make me try to guess at what he’s going to do when I run out of lane. Sometimes, they’ll slow down and let me over, and other times, they’ll floor the gas at the very last second.
I’ve seen more dead bodies in body bags on the side of the road in rural Thailand than I’ve seen cumulatively anywhere else in the world. It’s harrowing to a passenger in a passenger van. Private cars are a bit better, because they expect that all foreign workers are rich executives when we’re really just engineers.
What’s strange, though, is that subjectively the traffic in China appears much, much worse to me, but I’ve never seen a dead body on the side of the road. I did hit a moped crossing on a red, though. I don’t know how I didn’t cause a dead body.
When I worked for Eastern Airlines dozens of years ago, we traveled to Ecuador quite bit because we loved it. There was one highway that had a cross stuck into the ground, on the side of the road about every 15 feet. Someone has died at every point on that road.
My guess would be that they weren’t going so slow because they were white-knuckling it, it sounds more like they were tourists awed by the view. Nothing much you can do about those if you live in an area that tourists flock to. Just comfort yourself in knowing that they collectively spend enough money in your area to keep your taxes low (if it works that way in Australia) and try not to scare 'em off or make them write a bad TripAdvisor review.
