Its Winter You Fucks Either Drive Or Stay Home!!!

My half hour drive to work turned into an hour and a half thanks to the idiots who suddenly forgot how to drive in the Snow. Last night we got dumped on and I was able to drive home from my other job at an average of 40 Km/h with no problem. This morning, after the plows and the salters have done their job the average speed of 20… WTF!!!

Suddenly all of these people have become too afraid to drive on basically clear roads. Fucking morons! This is Canada we get snow. You should know how to drive in it!!! Even then the roads are clear!!! Acident causing, trafic impeding, morons!!

If it frightens you or makes you too nervous stay home and wait! Let the rest of us Get to work you dumb Fucks!!!

I’ve always wished we could have heated roads (somehow).
Then all the snow would melt.

Oh, fuck you. I can’t tell you the number of cars I’ve seen in life-ending accidents because they thought the roads were clear. Ever heard of black ice? And the plows aren’t magic – they don’t make the roads dry. The people who cause accidents are the ones tailgating, leaning on the horns, and generally scaring the shit out of the drivers willing to be cautious enough to not HAVE to be somewhere RIGHT NOW. I’d rather be late and alive. And I’m certainly more than tired of the people who try to drive me off the road because I have the nerve to go 5-10 under the speed limit because there’s ICE on the road. I don’t care if there’s sand/salt or not, it’s still dangerous.

Sorry, but almost every accident I’ve witnessed in poor weather has been the fault of reckless driving, not safe driving. (I say almost because I’ve seen a few where there was no clear fault.)

If you were aware of the phenomenon of slow snow drivers, why not leave for work earlier?

Word up! This is Canada! We drive cautiously! It’s not like you haven’t seen it before!

Just be thankful you aren’t dealing with snow drivers in Vancouver! Now THEY’re bad.

Black ice. Here’s SDSTAFF Bibliophage with a comprehensive article on black ice.

I live in Ontario too, and last night in my hour long drive I saw three cars in the ditch, one car flipped over, and one [police!] car stuck in a bank. The roads were bad last night…
And I hit a patch of black ice on highway 14 this morningwhen I thought the the roads wer clear…I was lucky I didn’t end up hitting the hydro pole…came within a couple of feet.

Please tell me you aren’t one of those people who thinks the posted speed limit is safe for all road conditions.

Maybe the reason they are driving slow is because they know how dangerous it can be to drive in snow. We seem to have the opposite problem here. People forget in the span of 5 or 6 months that they need to slow down in the snow.
Note:The minor rant below is not directed at you kingpengvin.

It pisses me off (which is actually pretty hard to do) when I’m driving in the right lane of the highway, going nice and slow so as to keep my car under control, when come dumb-ass mo-fucker blows by me on the left generating enough wind and slush to nearly blow my car off the road. Short of rushing someone to the hospital, there is absolutely no excuse for putting another person’s life in danger. :mad:

A wise person once told me that the best thing you can do while driving is to be predictable.

I’m from the South. Southern USA, that is. It doesn’t snow very often down here. I’m in my mid-thirties, and have only driven in snowy/icy conditions a handful of times. I know that people with more experience driving in adverse conditions are out there on the road, but it is IRKSOME to hear relocated Yankees bitch and moan about how “you southerners don’t know how to drive in the snow.”

No shit, Jasper.

I don’t know how to drive in magma, either. Or deep, deep underwater . Haven’t had the opportunity to acquire those particular skills down here.
If you miss driving in inclement weather so much, how bout you haul ya ass back up to Michigan, New Jersey, or one-a them other garden spots y’all fled? I don’t reckon they’ve closed off the border up there yet.
Meantime, while you’re still here, how bout slowing down a little while we’re all riding on the blamed ice? Safety first, and all that.
Thanks.

We have one in my city. There is a stretch of highway that goes over the city, called the S-curve, that was recently redone and is heated so that snow and ice melts rather quickly and does not build up. It is probably not cost-effective to do in most cases, but this has prevented many accidents, I’m sure. A very bad part of the road to have an accident, as there are no shoulders and no where to get off the road.

back to the rant. (I’m one of those who drives slow in snow/ice, but I stay over so those who want to go faster can. I allow myself plenty of time to get somewhere in the snow.) My rant about winter driving is against people who don’t allow themselves extra braking distance, and silde through intersections. I will wait at an intersection if I see another car coming too fast, even if it’s my turn. I’ve witnessed too many cars go sailing through to chance it.

I agree with the comments made that even if the road looks clear, there is no reason to go bombing down the highway at speeds excessively different than the other motorists. However…

kingpengvin does have a valid point. After the first major snowfall of the year (although last night was more like the second, there was one back in November), people become overly cautious, nervous drivers who spook too easy. Almost as bad as an over-agressive driver.

Also, this featherfoot phenomenon seems to be confined to the highways. This morning, motorists we going faster on the streets leading to the highway than on the highway itself. Come on people, at least be consistant…

I drove from toronto to guelph this morning and a lot of cars spun out into ditches due to black ice in what seemed like clear road conditions but with the sun shining and the snow melting and the temp dropping in some areas its a little bit slippery.

I used to commute on backroads through the Ontario snow-belt. There are actually drivers who are so overly-cautious that they create dangerous bottlenecks until they eventually spin out into the ditch from using their brakes too much (unfortunately, they often caused other cars to follow suit).

On the flip side of the coin, there were the maniacs who thought “plowed=summertime.” They didn’t just spin out and end up in the ditch, they would end up 30’ into the farmer’s field upside down!

I used to drive my 1990 Dodge Shadow, with all-season tires on unplowed rural roads. My former housemate would do the same (same car too, but 1989.) We’d only have to leave the house 10 minutes earlier because we’d drive a bit slower than usual, but would maintain a safe constant speed.

Those who inched along super-slow would end up in what we called the “ditch caravan” – a line of cars that either slid into the ditch or were part of a domino-effect low-speed series of collisions.

Iconoplast don’t forget “safe driving” does not necessarily mean “slow driving.” (By which I mean the dangerous super-slow drivers, 10 k/h under the speed limit is reasonable when the traction sucks, but 10k/h as top speed is dangerous). Too many commuters thought that “I’m slow, so I must be safe” and ended up in the ditch because they still weren’t dealing with the issues of traction (or lack thereof). To stay super-slow, they had to keep tapping their brakes – into the ditch they’d go.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Drivers’ Ed. adequately covers “slippery.”

Oh yeah but I did have to avoid hitting someone who decided to take a right hand turn into two lanes.:mad:

On the other hand, last time I was in New Mexico, the skies opened up in a deluge and I suddenly found myself driving in flash flood conditions, with 4"- 5" of water on the streets of Albuquerque. Thought to myself, “this is new…”

I had no clue as to how to drive in a flash flood rainstorm. I only vaguely remembered something about “never try to cross a wash out” or some such thing. I can drive in a zero-visibility snowstorm (though I’d rather not if given the choice), but a flash flood? Wha?

So this Yank just sort of looked around to see what the southerners were doing… Then I kind of pretended I was driving in deep snow and followed suit with the locals.

Dear fellow drivers:

I’ve recently moved from the bottom of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where there’s plenty of rain and no snow, to Reno, where we’ve spent all weekend having 90 mph wind gusts and snow and rain and fire and brimstone and god knows what else. I realize this is the Sierra Mountains, and it snows here from time to time, so please be patient with me as I learn how my car will react in this foreign weather. Because ya know, the most important thing to me isn’t so much that I make it to work with fifteen minutes to spare or that I drive fast enough so that everyone else on the road feels like they’re making good time, it’s that I stay alive so that I can come home this evening to my husband and my cat. I personally don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut if you think I’m driving too slow, 'cause I’d really like to see all of you try driving on a freeway with several inches of standing water from the six straight months of rain that I’m used to. Also, it’s my car and I’ll drive it how I want to. If I can keep my temper every time I get stuck behind some little old lady on her way to the casinos, going 15 mph down South Virginia on a perfectly clear day, you can do it during these severe storms.

Be safe. Try the “Basic Rule”. Think of other people. Leave a little earlier.

I’m aware that slow != safe in all circumstances. But in highway traffic in potentially dangerous conditions, I’m going to go noticeably slower than I would otherwise. That doesn’t mean that I advocate hitting the brakes frequently. I just advocate driving appropriately to the road conditions. Even in an automatic, you can downshift to help your car stay at appropriate speeds, and if you don’t start going fast, you don’t have to slow down from it either. I’m really thinking about the numerous flipped cars I’ve seen because people thought it wasn’t slippery, it wasn’t that bad, or perhaps that the laws of physics did not apply to them. Or the cars being pulled out of creeks/rivers/other bodies of water, or the sideways cars being held up by only tiny trees, or the cars that went into concrete or mountains or lightposts or fences or whatever. Ditches are the least of my worries, and I’d rather be in the ditch and walk away than off of an overpass and not. (FTR, if someone really wants to go faster than me, I’ll pull over at the safest opportunity. I’d say about 20-30% of the time I’ve done that, I’ve passed those people in the ditch a little farther down the road. Not worth the risk to me, and I’d also rather them in the ditch than them running me off the road. I’ll also note that I do call the State Patrol when I see that, but I don’t stop when I’m by myself.)

I must have had a radically different Drivers’ Ed. experience than most, probably because I learned to drive in the mountains. We had the option of taking an ice driving course, where one basically drove out onto a frozen lake and learned what made the car spin out and what didn’t. (Of course, what really taught me to drive in bad conditions was having to back a '78 El Camino down a steep switchback driveway with an even steeper dropoff on one side. There was a good amount of ice over the dirt, and the car was simply not going up anymore. I do not, however, advocate this.)

I still remember fondly once years ago when I was living in Rapid City, South Dakota, when we had a small snowfall of about 3". It wasn’t too bad, but it was slippery, so I was driving fairly slow; about 25 in a 35 mph zone…just working my way home.
All of a sudden this moron in a 4-wheel drive pickup went sailing by me doing what looked to be 50 mph. “Hell, I’ve got 4-wheel drive; I can do anything!!”…you know the attitude.
After letting the blizzard of snow caused by his slip-stream settle down, I (and a lady following me) continued on our way.
About 1/4 mile later, who should we run across but the moron…plowed head-first into a telephone pole! We stopped to see if he was OK, which he was.

Here comes the good part…

He had the gall to ask us for a ride!!! I just looked him in the eye, and said, “You know, if you hadn’t been driving like a fucking moron, you wouldn’t be in this fix.”

And drove off…to the applause of the lady…

…snow, you say?! Hey, we’ve got that beat: Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, people don’t know how to drive in the rain!!

Leave earlier, drive slower - works for me. Sure wish more people could do that.

OK let me restate my point in a level headed mannor not that I’ve had time to cool down.

1st I do understand the concept of black Ice and I know that in winter driving conditions are unsafe most of the season.

2nd I do not go the posted limit when the roads are such I keep between 10 to 20 under depending on the road and during an catual snowfall I will go 1/2 the posted limit or more.

That being said the ones I complain against are the ones who are overly cautious. The become too freaked out by the conditions and are just as unsafe as the jerkoffs who drive too quickly without heed to the conditions.

There were over 200 accidents in the last 16 hours and I know how bad it is out there. I drove in the middle of the storm last night when the visibilty was next to zero and the roads were snowbanks. I was doing 40 on the highway and that was taking risks at the time.

However, this morning was a different story. I say drive slow and leave space between you and the person in fron t of you, know how to deal with a skid, you know the common sense things of winter driving, but don’t turtle up in fear because it is just as unsafe.

I also slam those people who forget that you cant take your small car with bicycle tires up a large hill when the roads are icy.