You sound like someone who hasn’t done a lot of highway driving, because anyone who has knows that “simple rules” like this aren’t so simple in real-world conditions. In moderately congested traffic when you try the perfectly logical “X+” distance equation some idiot will fill the extra space. So you allow what space you can and be vigilant.
Good point – and I do use the turnouts on unfamiliar roads. And if I am leafpeeping or being lesiurely.
The left lane being reserved only for passing is the law is some states. But far from all states. It may well be the law everywhere *you *drive. But it isn’t the law where everybody else drives.
I’m the original poster. It is quite daunting that this post has got over a hundred replies. I may have touched a collective nerve.
I’m in the UK and notice that most of the posts are from people in the US, with your crazy tradition of driving on the right. We drive on the left, or, without wanting to sound too colonial, the correct side of the road.
In addition to the original post, I am very paranoid about cars driving too close to me when my mum is in the car. She has deteriorating vertebrae in her neck and a collision could be catastrophic. There seems to be an increase in tailgating in my area.
The police have suggested that bad car driving by youths comes in trends. In their mid-teens, they engage in street level antisocial behaviour. When they get to seventeen, they have access to cars and get to ‘piss people off’ in a new context.
A factor not mentioned yet, I think, is that if you pull over or speed up, you are seen as displaying submissiveness. This is obviously the more mature and safer course of action. However, (and this may be a typically male perspective), I think that an instinctive aversion to displaying weakness is what motivates people to slam on the brakes.
In every state it is either the law that the left lane is only for passing OR the left lane is for faster traffic. In either case, you’re breaking the law if you’re holding up faster traffic while driving in the left lane. The only difference is whether you need to move over to the right immediately after passing or not.
Why would anyone care? I have never once considered what someone passing me in their vehicle thought.
As for me, I’m always grateful when someone is willing to trod ahead and check for speed traps.
Agree 100%.
My point was simply to correct the provincial poster saying that driving in the left lane was always wrong & the sure sign of a scofflaw, if not an outright scoundrel.
As somebody hailing from a “slower traffic keep right” state I take exception to that attitude. Us fast folks paid for that lane and intend to use it from origin to destination. And want it cleared of slowpokes as you suggest.
I do give Massholes the benefit of the doubt for this reason, even when they are right behind me and we’re the only cars on the highway. That’s just what they’re used to. And they roar past me soon enough anyway.
Ugh! My mother does this. Besides driving 20 in a 30 zone, she actually will stop at a GREEN light. “Someone might go through their red light”. She is always tailgated, and is completely oblivious to it. If someone blows the horn at her, they are in the wrong. It drives me nuts.
~30 years on the road, including plenty of highway miles and a couple hundred thousand on a motorcycle - all accident free, due to my making safety a priority, even if it occasionally means letting an asshole get in front of me. Solost spoke as though he had no option other than to follow at a distance that requires hypervigilance, but the truth is that it’s a choice. If you’re the kind of person who gets agitated when someone gets in front of you - so much so that it’s actually less stressful for you to choose to close the gap and just watch the car in front of you like a hawk - then I’d suggest relocating to a less congested locale, or resorting to public transit as much as possible.
Actually the recommended behaviour is to ease on the brakes, which doesn’t fit either the “submissive” or aggressive ideas you describe.
Of course moving over and letting the guy pass is also OK, when it’s safe to do that.
But note that the very fact a car is tailgating you is itself reducing the opportunities to safely do that – before you move over you have to be sure he’s not about to try an undertaking move.
30+ years accident-free highway driving here as well. Though I don’t automatically take that as free reign to condescendingly lecture others about their driving skills online.
I will say though that anytime someone in front of you, at highway speeds, is doing anything erratic, it should naturally get anyone’s guard up. If you take that situation as a source of amusement rather than concern, I wish you and the drivers in your immediate vicinity good luck in the future.
How old is your mother (if I might ask?) Might this be a sign that she should be evaluated to see if she can safely drive.
Here in Minnesota an elderly driver had his license revoked for habitually driving too slow. He had been ticketed several times for driving on a semi-urban road with lots of traffic, going 40 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. Of course this created massive lines of slow cars during commuting time. His defense was he wasn’t speeding so he was law-abiding and that he was afraid of deer crossing the road. It sounds like he lost his trust that driving is normally a safe activity, so extra cautions can be dangerous, as in the case with your mother.
↑ ↑ ↑ This happens or needs to happen a lot. I am close to being curtailed like that … :: sigh :::
If you are in Honey’s, my opinion on what to do goes like this:
If, you or your siblings can’t stand up to the parent, then the only thing you can do is to refuse to ride with her with no exceptions. If you can’t stand to do that, you are doomed to what you are getting. If nothing changes, then nothing changes. You just keep getting what you are getting.
If, you can get the keys and hide them, call the cops every time she drives without the license. You just can’t do that to the parent…
Then you should not live in fear, just have all; the paper work of wills and stuff, for you done and ready & get used to the fact if you are lucky, she will kill you.
If, she does not kill you, just puts you in a wheel chair forever, and she only gets a broken arm. Well, you were a dutiful child.
Your caretakers will probably not look at it that way. And every time I see this played out, maybe not over as serious a thing like we have here, the dutiful child loses big time…
Very many people can not stand up to their parents and for their families, they drop nearly everything, messing up plans, etc. because you can’t not do that, Then don’t look surprised when your SO &* adult kids leave you to it and they move on.
Both my parents stopped driving on their own. They did not like the rest of their choices but never was it heard for them to ask a ride.
7 children still living, the offers to take one or both on a shopping trip or vacation were many but even with only one child, I think it would be the same.
Old age is not a license to be a problem.
Mental health, physical health changes things… sometimes.
A submissive adult child does no family any good IMO.
Your situation may vary, just my opinion & experience.
She’s 80. Mentally and physically she’s still quite with it. In fact, she still works full time with me in the summer at the amusement park. She is just overly cautious in a car.
An old humorous answer from the deep South goes something like this
What do you do when some jackhole is tailgating you?
“First you hold a beer out the window. If they don’t back off, you throw it.”
The Russian solution also is humorous
Russia, the deep south, it's almost the same thingApparently not. On both sides of the pond, the left lane is referred to as the “inside lane”. “Inside” obviously means the centre of the road, so in your very language, you reveal that you all realize that you are driving on the incorrect side of the road.