Is there a standard length for the broken lines that form the middle of the road passing lane?
Whew! That was a hard one!
If you go here (you’ll need Adobe Acrobat), you’ll find one of the CA DOT manuals… I didn’t read it in it’s entirety, but I bet you’ll find the info you’re looking for in it somewhere…
I gotta know… why do you want to know?
As I recall it’s 21 feet.
Lost a bar bet on that once. Damn near got run over on the highway trying to measure one at 11:00pm.
May vary from state to state though, unless the Feds are involved
There must be. In France (where I passed my driving license) you even have to know what the distance is, cause they show you slides when you go to pass your theoric exam and it could be a question. For example, I had a slide showing a car in front of “me” and you had to tell them how far the car was, you had to count the lines and multiply (and I suck in calculus…), so you have to know the distance between lines and how long is the line itslef!
Try this document. It might help:
Just a guess, based on experience, but I doubt there’s a legal standard. I suspect there is just a standard practice, arrived at over the years.
My experience is not with the law but with road striping crews. I was part of such a crew once long ago (when I was in high school). There were usually five of us. The senior guy got to drive the cool painting machine. The next two in seniority got to ride in (the cab of) the truck following the cool painting machine. The least senior guys, i.e., the summer help (guess who?), had to actually work so we got to ride in the bed of the truck where we could lean out and put the cones down to keep drivers off the fresh paint.
My recollection is hazy given the amount of time elapsed but I believe the painting machine had an automatic spray cycle – on and off on a timed cycle, so the driver had to maintain a constant speed to keep the stripes the same length. It wasn’t hard to do on a level road (it had a manual throttle rather than a pedal) and I believe he could adjust the timing as needed to lengthen/shorten the stripes. His primary goal, usually, was to paint over the old stripes as nearly as possible.
The bottom line is that if there were some strict legal standard to uphold, these guys weren’t the ones to trust with the job. It was not the sort of job to attract and retain the best and brightest, if you get my drift. The primary qualification was the ability to stay awake during long, stultifying days. (This was not a problem in the back of the truck.) When the truck driver fell asleep (top speed was only 5-10 mph) he’d drive over the new paint and make a mess of it. When the paint machine operator fell asleep he’d weave all over the road and you’d end up with some highly unusual stripes. The most exciting time was when the truck driver was asleep when the painter stopped. The truck was only a few feet back so – BOOM! – he’d rear-end the paint machine. I honestly believe there were two men in the cab so there’d be a reasonable chance that one of them was awake. And the one who was awake had to watch the painter, too, and honk the horn when he drifted off.
It was, all things considered, a fairly interesting job and really kind of fun for a summer, but not a good career, IMHO.
plto, thanks so much for the story.
When I was taking physics in highschool (so, about 5 years ago), our instructor informed us that the lines were roughly one car length long. [That would be about 15 feet for the average car, I believe.] The spacing was varied, she said, depending on the road, so that they would always appear to be the same distance apart no matter what speed you were travelling at. (So, a highway would have its lines roughly twice as far apart as a city street, I imagine.)
She might have just been blowing smoke, but she was usually right about things like that. (Bizarre, mundane trivia, I mean.)
As evidence of all that pluto said - road stripe painting is boring, the folks doing aren’t the most experienced or knowledgable (ok - smart), etc. - is this picture. It was supposedly a Florida DOT crew that painted over the poor dead possum. The tale was used by management to encourage us worker bees to pay attention to what we are doing, to focus on the big picture, and not just keeping the paint-stripe truck going straight.
And to the OP, the standard set in the MUTCD (stuyguy’s link) is pretty damn close to a legal standard. If someone has a crash (wreck, whatever) and the road stripes or signs do not meet MUTCD, the public agency is going to take it in the ass, and the taxpayers’ pocket books.
I like the picture, but really, what impresses me is how straight the lines are. I have to wonder, also, what management would have you do instead, and why. Stopping and starting will probably mess up the lines more than the bit missing where the possum is at. Swerving around it leaves a messed up spot for years. This way, in a little while (a month?) all you have is a little bit of missing paint.