I think this has more to do with it than anything. Here in South Dakota, the state legislature passed a bill that raises the gas tax by 6 cents per gallon, raises the vehicle excise tax by 1 percent, raises license plate fees by 20 percent and allows townships and counties to impose additional property taxes for roads and bridges. But to appease the masses and quell revolution, they raised the speed limit on the (two) interstates from 75 to 80 mph.
The phrase “weave in and out of traffic” is obviously meant to be scary, but yes if you want to go faster than the slowest lane on a multi-lane highway you do occasionally need to change lanes. Changing lanes is not a dangerous maneuver if you use your mirrors and turn signals. The whole idea of a multi-lane highway is that it can accommodate people doing a wide range of speeds because you can always pass, but that doesn’t work when someone decides they’re going plenty fast and get to stay in the left lane regardless of what traffic behind them is doing.
Like I mentioned earlier, if you ever drive on a European-style highway this all becomes pretty obvious, and speed differential is not the problem. To take an extreme example, on the unlimited sections of the autobahn the right lane is often near bumper-to-bumper with trucks going 80-100 KPH but the left lane is full of people doing 200 KPH. It works because when you pass you spend as little time as possible in the left lane. If you want to go 120 KPH, yes, you will be constantly going from the right to left lane and back but when people actually do it it’s quite safe and works very well.
And there you have it… the confessions of a left lane hog. Going back and forth is what you should be doing, not tying up traffic. “Going back and forth every few miles” doesn’t sound like a burden to me.
I once spent about two hours trying (vainly) to get past a left lane hog on I-26 once, who (doing c. 2 below the limit) simply refused to move over despite multiple opportunities to do so. The right lane was congested just enough that none of us could easily pass him to the right-most of the time there were like 12 cars backed up behind the essobee, with the semi’s and the grandmas to the right.
I don’t either, unless they are parked 2 feet from my bumper when I cannot move over-like they somehow expect me to magically merge into the vehicle to my immediate right like I am phantom or something. Like the wacko airhead the other day (3 lanes), I had moved into the left lane to pass some slowpokes, was about to merge back to the middle one (where I prefer to cruise given all of the traffic in the right one constantly entering and exiting the highway)-when I saw the truck in the far right lane with all of his splendid left turn signals going off like the 4th of July.
So I waited to pass him completely to give him room to merge to his left, and all the while she is shaking her fist at me in her rear-view mirror. Stupid bitch never noticed that his signals were on. Finally got the margin I needed to safely move over-except that she had simultaneously changed right along with me. Meanwhile the moron in the truck had never actually merged having simply forgotten to turn the fucking thing off. She zipped in front of him then right on back to the left again, where she immediately glommed onto the tail of another victim. Bah.
Every few miles at 75 mph is something like every couple of minutes… for a very large portion of a 4-5 hour trip. It’s a colossal pain in the ass.
And really, why is it my obligation to enable people to exceed the speed limit by 15+ mph, by the expedient of screwing myself around and potentially getting stuck behind the slowpokes?
It’s not like traffic is getting “tied up” if I’m going 80 in the left lane, just because the people behind me want to go 90; the real problem is the slowpokes going 65 or slower in the right lane.