Well, very few parts of Europe have no posted speed limit. I can only think, off the top of my head, of certain sections of autobahn in Germany. In general, speed limits in Europe are comparable to those in the USA, with somewhere between 70 and 80 mph being the norm on open highways.
My experience with lane discipline is more in line with Mr. Floppy’s. It is really spotty here in the Greater Boston Area, in fact now that I think about it this has to be one of the reasons drivers in this area have such a bad reputation. There seems to be a sizable minority of drivers on the road who just don’t know or don’t care about keeping right and leaving the left lane open for traffic which may want to pass you.
My wife is a big offender in this regard, and she is technically a certified driving instructor(!). She’ll be tooling along at 60 in the left lane on the Mass. Turnpike then get all huffy and offended when someone comes up behind her and blinks their lights.
I’ve mostly given up trying to explain it to her. She just. Doesn’t. Get it.
Having taking all my driving lessons in California, and having a California driver’s license since my teens, I can tell you – it’s not taught in driver’s ed here. In fact, we had no lessons on highway driving at all, nor did the license exam require us to know anything about highway driving. It was conducted entirely on city streets.
Ed
Mercedes, BMW and VW/Audi all electronically limit their vehicles to 155 mph to placate the German Green Party. Porsche doesn’t, for obvious reasons.
I cant imagine what driving school would pass you with out ever getting on the highway, how long ago was this? (laws changed in the past 5-10 years in Cali and Wash)
I teach left is for passing right is for driving but its one of those things that you cant easily get people to do when 95% of the other drivers on the road get it wrong so what I really drill into students is to move with traffic in their lane and if its going to fast then keep your speed up until you can move over to a slower one.
I got my license in San Diego, CA around 1981. The instructor definitely had me tooling around the freeways. I was taught not to pass on the right, and I think to generally keep right when not passing, but in Socal there are often so many lanes it’s often better to keep in the middle lane if you aren’t passing and aren’t headed for an exit. It gets just like that going through Frankfurt, too.
That’s nothing. I got my Florida drivers’ license without ever getting onto a road- my high school used an old converted sports field as a driving “track”.
Driving in Florida is terrifying. I already knew how to drive- I learned when I was 12- but you better believe that 90% of the people on the roads around here learn by trial and error.
This was around 1979, in Los Angeles.
Ed
Yes - Top Gear are necessarily a little creative with their scripting, because it’s boring for the viewer to hear over and over that they don’t know first-hand the real top speed of cars because of limiters, so it’s ‘up to a limit of’ or similar.
I forgot to mention, this wasn’t a driving school. It was my high school. Back then, public high schools offerered driver’s ed for credit. The classroom portion counted as half a semester of a “domestic elective” (e.g. Home Ec or Woodshop or something like that) and the in-car portion counted as half a semester of PE.
They certainly don’t do that nowadays.
Ed
Aside from exit ramps, traffic is usually too dense to follow “stay right, pass left”. All lanes get utilized.
Well… I got pulled over in Texas because I was traveling in the left lane. Of course, REALLY the cop was furriner-fishing: we had California plates on the car. So our “5mph too fast” and the left lane were his excuse. I had almost never heard of that in America, but one of my Texas friends acted like it was common knowledge.
There are exit lanes on the fast lane of an interstate? Like… … on the left side? If I’d encounter one without warning, I think that would really break my brain. :eek:
They’re rare, and becoming rarer. I think the standards were rewritten at some point so they don’t build any more, and remove the existing ones when highways are rebuilt or widened.
“Drive right; pass left,” is just not the de facto rule in the U.S, no matter how many message board posters wish it were (not that you’re somehow wrong for wishing that or anything). It’s pretty much just “left lane, go faster; right lane, go slower”.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
The fact that people don’t know how to drive does not make it “not a rule”; it makes them idiots.
It’s the law.
There are quite a few of these left on I-5 in Seattle, I’m sad to say. The mess thus created is pretty horrific.
It’s not the law in California, at least. (Specifically, it is not illegal to pass on the right.)
Ed
[my bolding]
It may not be illegal to do it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be cited if you cause an accident doing it.
Based on that I’d think it’d be the slow moving vehicle that failed to move right that would get the ticket, not the one passing on the right.