“The situation” is the fact that two cars are in the same lane going different speeds and is necessarily created by two cars. The situation is made better if everyone just automatically follows the simple rule: the faster car gets in the left lane, the slower car gets in the right lane, each goes on his merry way not irritating the other.
Don’t hold your breath. I’m pretty sure it’s BS.
Can we have a quick poll, please, of those who’ve driven on European roads? There’s an awful lot of speculation and rather bizarre scenario-creating rather than discussion of what it’s actually like when people know which lane they should be in.
I definitely have (I’ve only been in the US for 5 years), I’ve driven for years in the UK, and done some driving in other countries in Europe. In Italy they are even more serious about the “overtaking lane” thing than in the UK, I DARE you try being a “left lane slowpoke” in Italy.
IMO US freeways would SIGINIFICANTLY more efficient (and alot safer) if they enforced the “passing lane” rule. The 101 down the San Francisco peninsula is a classic example of this, you’ll regularly be held up by a block of traffic travelling SIDE BY SIDE at the SAME SPEED! That just wouldn’t happen in Europe.
I know it’s a couple of pages ago, but I must explain myself better. I was not meaning a merge caused by an accident, where we are all going to be stopped anyway. I am meaning a merge that is there every day, 365 days a year, where people wait to merge at the last second, causing yet more lanes to be backed up. I get to see this 4 times a day in a round trip. It’s hard to fight the urge to not let them in, but then I am just exacerbating the problem.
Links about slowpokes:
http://www.roadandtravel.com/carcare/drivetooslow.htm
http://www.akrepublicans.org/pastlegs/22ndleg/spst/spstsb222.shtml
Here are the “Keep Right Laws” : http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
I think what I dislike the most about the slowpoke drivers in the left lane is their almost uniform arrogance in trying to control the behaviors of other drivers.
I’ve always known to stay to the right except to pass.
It is about the way you like to drive. I fully realize that driving a few miles an hour faster does not save any significant time.
I simply LIKE to drive faster, it makes my driving time more enjoyable to me. If I’m “wasting” gas, I don’t give a rat’s ass because that “waste” is serving the purpose of enhancing my enjoyment of life. When I can drive the way I want, I’m relaxed. When I am impeded by someone who parks his butt in the left lane and drives at the exact same speed as the car to his right, making it impossible for me to get past him by any means, that raises my frustration and blood pressure because that person is interfering with the way I would like to drive.
There is really no good reverse analogy, but if you can imagine some way in which some other driver could force you against your will to drive 10 miles an hour faster than you were comfortable with, that’d be the same experience in reverse.
If you don’t drive fast, and you drive in the right lane, than you are a wonderful human being and I wish there were more drivers like you where I drive. You and I get along: you don’t interfere with my driving and I don’t interfere with yours.
The point is that it has nothing to do with absolute speed. Its RELATIVE speed that’s at issue here. You can go as slow as you want in the right hand lane, and no one has any right to complain (within reason, I assume there are minimum speed limits, but that’s a different issue). The point is with the left lane, its an OVERTAKING lane, it doesn’t matter if your going fifty or ninety if there is no one on your right, or the guy on your right is going the same speed as you, then you HAVE NO BUSINESS IN THAT LANE.
It all goes back to the idea of an “overtaking lane”, you should only be in there if you are OVERTAKING, that is you have actively taken the decision to get past the guy in front of you, by pulling into the left lane, accelerating, and then GETING THE HELL OUT OF THE LEFT LANE. Just dawdling in the left the lane for the hell of it is pointless, and slows everyone down.
One thing I didn’t mention about driving in the left lane. I live in a pretty rural area and there are a lot of deer. When I’m driving to work in the early morning, it is pretty dark out. I often will stay in the left lane just for the purpose of giving myself an extra fraction of a second to react if a deer comes bounding out of the woods across the interstates, from either side of the freeway. This left lane driving puts me in a more centered position in relation to the side of the road where the deer are emerging from. I see completely destroyed deer carasses and smashed up cars all the time. I drive a small car and am pretty certain that colliding with a deer head on at highway speeds will total my car and possibly injure or kill me.
Of course, if while my constant surveillance of my rearview mirror reveals an overtaking driver coming up behind me, I move over in plenty of time to let him or her pass, then get back into the left lane.
This is the only scenario by which I stay in the left lane almost constantly (if traffic permits, which it usually does out here in BFE).
Otherwise I use the left lane only to pass, then move over to the right.
What is it with your insistence about people that like to drive faster than you do being “children” or “not in control of their emotions”?
This is about basic road courtesy, and signs all over the USA confirm it: slower traffic should keep right, which not only includes cargo trucks, but drivers such as yourself that like to drive right at the speed limit. I don’t like the speed limit in many places, I think it’s too slow.
And another thing: this meme about “only saving two minutes” is not always true. I used to drive 40 miles one way to work every day, almost all of it rural interstate with very little traffic because it was 5:00am. If i drove 55mph that whole way, I would most certainly get there more than two minutes later than if I drove 70mph or faster (usually 80mph, the limit on this interstate is 70mph). It’s more like 15 minutes difference.
That “two minutes” blip only proves true over shorter distances, in heavier traffic, or on surface streets with stop lights/signs.
Do you all know why people on access/feeder roads are required to yield to drivers exiting the freeway? Do you know why slow traffic must yield to faster traffic? It’s because of physics. A vehicle that is slowing down is harder to control than a car that is accelerating or maintaining a constant speed. When you make a driver hit his brakes, you increase the odds that he will lose some of his control. Also a slow(er) driver that hangs out in the left lane doesn’t just make someone slow down, he makes the faster driver change lanes WHILE he is slowing down. The person driving straight while maintaining a constant speed is extremely safe while the person slowing down is changing lanes. That’s two (more) dangerous maneuvers he’ll have to make. So that is why slower traffic must by law move to the right when faster traffic is coming up from behind.
I think the people who replied understood enough. What they were saying was that people who choose to merge early make the line longer because there is a perfectly good lane for half a mile or more that isn’t being used at all. The road designers (who are traffic engineers) create a merge point at the point they did for a reason. Some of us think that if everyone merged when the two lanes merge, traffic would flow more smoothly than if everyone merged from one lane to the other waaaaay back.
It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation though. Is the line caused by people who merge at the last minute or is it caused by people who merge early? Is the empty lane created by the people who try to zoom past or is it created by people who merge early? Clearly the empty lane is caused by people who merge early. How can drivers zoom past a line of cars if the lane they are in has cars in it? What would happen if everyone just stayed in the lane they were in and didn’t merge until the last minute? What causes people to begin to merge early? This would need to be studied.
A comparison between the two methods would really need to be done to find the real answer here. Until that is done we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Braking is also bad for fuel economy, causes traffic waves and jams, and believe it or not almost completely unnecessary if you’re not tailgating*. I used to drive 16 miles home from work in thick 5 o’clock traffic and not hit the brakes once. When I saw brake lights in front of me I would let off the gas, and the brakers were almost invariably speeding up again before I got an unsafe distance from them.
*A lot of you won’t believe it but go try it before you comment, and don’t say you’ve tried it before. Try it the next time you’re driving on the highway if you have an intellectually honest desire to know if what I’m saying is true. You will be surprised. Tapping the brakes all the time is so ingrained in most of us that it’s hard to conceive of it being for no reason.
Sure there is.
You’re forcing other drivers to play Dodge 'Em with you because you can’t be arsed to obey the law. If you accept the idea that excessive lane-changing is risky behavior, you’re making me take on that risk because you would rather have an open lane to the horizon. I have to be a better, more alert, more considerate, more cautious driver, simply because you don’t care to be.
There is nothing “excessive” about changing lane after you’ve overtaken someone (and if your not overtaking someone, then the pulling into the left lane in the first place is “excessive”). Its simply part of the correct overtaking procedure…
Checking your blind spot is not “excessive”, neither is signalling, nor checking your mirror, or any of the other parts of the procedure. NEITHER IS RETURNING TO THE RIGHT LANE!
Could you maybe be “arsed” to acknowledge the fact that sometimes one car is going faster than another car and they are both miraculously obeying the law?
Why not? You violate the law. Why is the law rational?
I agree with your braking philosophy, although obviously it is necessary sometimes!
I drive a manual transmission and I use the transmission to help me reduce wear on my brake pads all the time, and to slow myself down hills, behind cars, etc.
One thing many people also do not realize is that in many near-miss accident situations, accelerating can be more valuable than slamming on your brakes to avoid a collision. We’re kinda conditioned to slam the brakes in panic mode, but often in situations like this I’ve found that gassing it and/or evasive manuevers can save your ass from an accident more capably than just mashing your brakes.
Umm. No. It seems that you would like to sit in the left lane and have an open lane to the horizon, and force others to work their way around you. Wow. There is nothing considerate, or cautious about the folks that park their ass in the left lane.
You live in the US as do I. Answer me this. What is the left lane of a highway typically called?
Want courtesy. Drive slower and more carefully.
This is pretty much what the slowpoke argument always boils down to: you don’t like the fact that someone is driving faster than you and you would like to prevent that. If I am driving two mph faster than you, you don’t see it as necessary to extend me any courtesy because you disapprove of my maniacal road rampage.
Have you always felt this need to control others?