I drive a bobtail delivery truck every weekday, and every day someone pulls this dumb-ass maneuver in front of me:
I’ll be a few seconds behind the car/suv(status utility vehicle) and they’ll slow down to an almost-stop in the middle of the right lane, activate their signal at the last second, turn a little to the left, then head into the driveway.
I can’t tell you how many of these gene-pool winners almost get squashed by the 7 1/2 tons of fun I’m driving.
Here’s how you enter a driveway without risking your short life:
Use your signal earlier. This lets the people behind you know you’re about to do something possibly really stupid.
Pull as far to the right in the lane as you safely can. This keeps you out of harm’s way in most cases and you drastically cut down the chance of getting a delivery truck or other vehicle wedged into your buttocks. I live by this rule and practice it every time I enter a driveway. This gives the cars behind me fair use of the lane and they don’t have to come to a screeching halt due to my turn.
Granted not all streets allow for this practice but there’s no excuse for someone blocking an entire right lane just to enter the driveway of Wal-Mart for the latest Chinese gadget.
You’re an idiot. The proper way to turn into a driveway from a busy street is to punch the accelerator, then jump on the e-break and cut the wheel. Then patiently wait for a break in traffic to cross the road into your driveway.
Ooooh! Ooooh! And when you do master point number 1, double it after the first snowfall. I have winter tires, traction control and follow at a safe distance, but in winter you can never totally be equipped for the ‘OH SHIT PERSON RANDOMLY BRAKING WITHOUT A SIGNAL FUUUUUUUCK’.
The people who don’t activate the turn signals until actually executing the turn should be kicked in the face. I mean, at that point, don’t even bother are you trying to rub your assholishness in our face or something? Oh, sure, it’s not that you’re too lazy to use your turn signal, you just won’t use it in time to actually be useful.
If you don’t use your turn signal until after you’ve come to an almost stop, I already know what you’re doing. After, of course, I have been surprised and pissed off by your apparent stopping in the middle of the road for no reason whatsoever.
Your turn signal tells me that you’ll be slowing down to well below the speed of traffic, and I can adjust and prepare accordingly.
I live on a busy road that is a crossroad to an even busier road.
Even though it is a 40mph speed limit area, there are closely packed homes on both sides. Those homeowners have my sympathy.
They can’t easily back out of their driveway without risking life and limb. Hopefully the traffic light timing provides a gap when they can pop out. And then coming home must be an extra special danger every single day.
As I drive that road, I am always paying attention to folks who seem to be slowing down in the right lane for no particular reason—those are the people who will suddenly stop and turn into a driveway.
Fortunately, most of them do follow the OP rule #1 and they turn on their signal well in advance.
I’m so glad I don’t live on that street.
Of course, the exception to the turn signal rule in New Jersey traffic is the “lane change”. When changing lanes in heavy traffic on a busy Jersey highway, it is pretty much given that drivers will flip their turn signal on two microseconds before the lane change; otherwise, the butthead behind the gap will speed up to block the lane change.
It is hopeless. My daily commute used to require me to turn left from a four lane road with no turn lane. Typically the traffic was fairly light, especially in my direction, but it was not uncommon that I would need to wait 10-30 seconds for a hole in oncoming traffic to make my turn.
I always signaled well in advance, and in fact started hand signaling (in addition to the blinker) when there was a car following in my lane. In spite of this, never once did a car behind me move to the vacant right lane before I forced them to a complete stop. A few honked at me…with NO traffic in the right lane. Over 10 years of commuting I must have seen well over 250 examples, and not one could anticipate that my signaling a left turn might make it advisable to change lanes sooner rather than later. When I rode a motorcycle to work, I went about mile/4 farther to avoid that turn for fear of being rear-ended.
There was no place to turn left for at least 1000-1500’ beyond my turn, as a Jersey barrier started just past there. Unless it was a co-worker following me, nobody needed to be in the left lane rather than the right.
If they can’t get a clue from the blinker, it will never, ever occur to them to provide one.
I mostly agree with you. If you can’t do a half bootleg turn then what are you even doing on MY roadway? Hmmm? As for waiting for a break in traffic, screw that shit. If the smoke from my tires wasn’t enough of a clue for you to GTF out of my way, then I guess that means you want to play bumper cars.
You seem to believe something about fractional lanes that I confess unfamiliarity with.
It sounds like you’re following too closely in a congested area. People are going to turn into the Walmart parking lot, and they’re not likely to be the sharpest tools in the shed.
Being surprised by such behavior in traffic is something I’d regard as a cardinal sin for a driver who should be paying attention, let alone one who drives for a living.
My driving bitch du jour is the delivery drivers who think turning one’s hazard lights on makes it acceptable to block an entire lane of a major artery into the business district of our nation’s capital during rush hour in order to make a delivery. I’m sorry there isn’t anywhere more convenient for you to park, but that isn’t my problem, or the problem of the 4,000 people you have caused a massive delay for. And you do it every day, Mr. Fed Ex asshole. Why the cops don’t ticket you I have no clue.
Paraphrasing the OP: I follow too closely and then get mad when other people slow down in front of me. But just in case you call me on this, I’ll throw in something about late signalling that in reallity happens rarely, but I’ll bump that up to happening all the time. And in case you’re still not on my side, I also hate Wal-Mart.
When the OP’s delivery truck rear-ends one of these drivers, the cops aren’t going to buy his story about the other guy’s “late signaling”. He’ll get a ticket for following too closely, the company’s insurance rates will go up, and he might find himself out of a job.
I think the point of the OP that you guys (and just about everyone driving around me) are missing is that when you make a right turn, it is my understanding that you are supposed to get over into the rightmost lane and turn from that, not from the driving lane. That way you can turn at your leisure without interfering with the flow of traffic, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only driver in Calgary who actually does this.
My beef about people turning into driveways from busy roads is one I saw just last week - a person turning left into their driveway across traffic, against a solid yellow line. I know that is your house and your driveway and you want to go to there, but you can’t cross a solid line, ever. There is no break in the line specifically for YOUR driveway because the city in a bit of unprecedented wisdom understands that every person holding up traffic on a major road to turn left into their driveway isn’t a good idea.
Not sure where the OP is, but in Florida there is no “rightmost lane” that is not also a driving lane. In Upstate New York (and presumably other places that get snow like Calgary), there is indeed a car-sized shoulder, so I would support the OP’s rant in that situation. If the car needs to slow to almost a standstill before turning it should move into the shoulder lane.
In places like Florida where there’s almost always just a foot or two of shoulder or even a concrete barrier, that’s another story, but I might still support the rant but that depends on how early the braking is and how slow the car slowed down to. But even if there were an accident it wouldn’t mean the slow driver was to blame, it would mean both of the drivers were to blame.
Moving all the way to the right in this situation (when the vehicle will remain partly in the lane) only makes things more dangerous, as it encourages other drivers to swerve around the turning car and partially into the left-hand or oncoming lane of traffic.
This is my feeling as well. While I completely agree that turners should signal early and not slow down too suddenly, I also cannot tolerate tailgaters. When I’m turning, the time it takes me to do so is often inversely proportional to the distance between my rear bumper and the next vehicle’s grille.
Bottom line, pay attention, leave enough interval, and slow down when the driver in front of you slows down, whether they bother to signal or not. And quit moaning about the 5 seconds it takes to wait for somebody else to turn. Are you really in that much of a hurry?
My father drove a car for more than 60 of his 87 years, and could not master the concept of the turn signal. He thought, because it was called a “turn signal”, that you used it to signal that you were turning. Not that you were going to turn–if that were the case, we’d call it a “going-to-turn signal”, right?–but that you were in the process of turning.
In vain did my mother argue with him for 40 years. What did a woman know? In vain did my brother and I argue with him for 30 years, after we learned to drive. What did kids know?
Even though he was my own father, I kept hoping some pissed-off truck driver would rear-end him and give him the ass-kicking he so badly deserved. But it never happened.