It just struck me - for the last decade I’ve lived two blocks from a large funeral home, next door to a large church, and two blocks down from a huge church, and yet I’ve only ever noticed one funeral procession in the area. (No, that doesn’t mean I’ve been cutting off the rest; I maybe drive once a month and walk the rest of the time.) I wonder if processions just aren’t done much any longer around here (western suburbs of Chicago) or what.
Good link Alice.
My thinking has always been that funerals have the right away. One crosses your path or gets in front of you, you wait.
I am confused with people meeting a funeral and stopping. I don’t remember my dad doing that he would have never done anything disrespectful for a funeral. I do note funerals are often led by the Police with flashing lights. I am afraid in that case, the stop for emergency vehicles may govern it. What do others feel about that?
I do want to add that I was a little miffed at first when my brother and sister set up the arraignments for other mother’s funeral and skipped the procession to the cemetery. Later as I looked at things, I liked the idea. The funeral was in the basement of the church. To have extracted all the elderly attenders from the basement, loaded them in cars, processed to the cemetery, unloaded them, and walked into the chapel would have been a real burden. The cemetery hasn’t done graveside services for year, using the chapel instead. Instead, we walked down the hall from the chapel in the church to the social hall and remembered my mother over a nice dinner. It was about my mother, not the body she was done with. To me the procession has become one more pagan honor to the body. I love my great great grandfathers tome stone. There is a hand carved on it pointing upwards. The body that was buried in the ground isn’t him.
During my grandmother’s recent procession to the cemetary, even oncoming semi’s pulled over and waited on the berm until the procession had passed.
No, we don’t give out local custom handbooks but watch, listen, and learn. I can’t speak on behalf of alice but would think she was just saying that given your circumstances and the dude in the procession’s circumstances, perhaps you should give him a break. Was he right when he got wacked out when you made a traffic oopsies, absolutely not. However, having just lost a loved one, he may not have been thinking all that clearly at that moment in time. We see rudeness every day and I think it’s the default judgement when something like this happens. We don’t always think that it may have been just a simple mistake.
While I whole-heartedly agree that it is respectful and the decent thing to do to give funeral processions the right of way … I will also point out that some people IN the procession just do not get it and make it more difficult for other drivers to be courteous … they straggle along behind, leaving big gaps, and don’t do anything to make it obvious that they are part of the procession. That’s confusing and dangerous for everyone else. Bad situations are not always the fault of other drivers being inconsiderate.
ETA - a good funeral home staff will organize the procession to get everyone on the same page. In our area, they can be quite long, but it is made clear that if you lag behind and miss lining up into the procession, at that point you are simply driving to the cemetery and are not officially part of the “processing” cars and so must obey normal traffic rules. Having the escort motorcycles at the front AND back makes a big difference, too.
That happens partly because typically a lot of people who go to funerals are older, and are no longer such good drivers as they used to be. This seems to have happened in Anaamika’s case, since two cars were able to drive through the gap in the procession.
There’s often very little time to realize that one is approaching a funeral procession. If the hearse has gone by, you may not see much more than “a car with its headlights on is turning in front of me,” particularly if there’s no placard or flag (and even those may not be readily visible, depending on the angle of approach). My car has daytime running lights, so my headlights are on all the time; I just don’t see that as a unique identifier by itself. Given enough time, it’s easier to recognize that it’s not just a line of cars – oh, they all have their lights on, it’s a funeral – but it’s asking a lot to expect everyone to figure that out immediately.
A realization I had when I was riding in my father’s funeral procession was actually to notice how much the traffic and the pedestrians we were passing were just going about their normal days. It just felt weird to contemplate that for us, something huge had happened and life had stopped, but for the rest of the world, life was going on as usual.
Absolutely, if you’re the other driver, be kind and respectful as much as you can. But by the same token, if you’re in the procession, remember that you’re not in the church or at the gravesite; you’re sharing a public road with other people (and, frankly, imposing on them). There will be times when it’s reasonable to cut a little slack for other drivers.
I apparently ran afoul of a funeral procession once, I’m in the N bound lane, and all of the sudden the car in front of me skids to a stop. Apparently there was funeral procession heading South, but in no way was the N bound lane interefering with the procession. So I nimbly maneuvered around the stopped car and went on my way. I don’t hink I broke teh funeral procession law, but passing on a shoulder, ok i broke that one.
I think she saw your bringing up the law as if it absolves you for breaking the custom.
It really is that big a deal to a lot of people. As indicated by you being flipped off.
There’s nothing in Indiana’s funeral procession law about stopping for funeral processions. There’s even a provision that explicitly says that you can pass a funeral procession going in the same direction, so it would be really bizarre to allow that but ban driving past one going the other way. ETA: This article says the same thing.
Some people seem to think that it’s their job to enforce their personal notions about what’s “respectful”, though. A while back, there was a letter to the editor in the local newspaper in which the writer praised a driver who had blocked both lanes in one direction on a four-lane road to force people to stop for a funeral procession going the other way. :rolleyes:
If the funeral director didn’t mark all the cars in the procession, then I can’t imagine how you were just supposed to guess that’s what you were seeing at 30-40 mph. I steadfastly refuse to try to drive in a procession if the funeral director hasn’t managed to flag my car, for this very reason. Just having on headlights in the daytime is no longer any sort of indicator of anything, let alone a sign that you’re in a procession and are entitled to automatic right of way at every crossing.
And I think people are failing to notice, the guy who went for the double-barrel flip off was himself in the wrong, in that he tried to pass the car in the procession ahead of him. Whether they had right of way or not, he didn’t have the right of way to both overtake the car ahead of him in the procession and try to cut Anaamika off in one, clearly-not-so-smooth move. Having the legal or moral right of way doesn’t mean you can go around the car ahead of you, cut a corner, and cut in front of oncoming traffic when there clearly isn’t time to do so before an accident would occur, which is what would’ve happened if he hadn’t stopped again before going through his little drama of wordless screaming and obscene hand gestures.
Just yesterday, I had to take a written driver’s test to renew my driver’s license. In Illinois, it is state law to yield and give right of way to a funeral procession.
Diddums got to the funeral about 10 seconds later than he would have? Waaaah!
This is very true. I have, on a couple of occasions, turned unknowingly into a poorly-marked funeral-procession. And I was severely berated and honked at to holy hell for my inadvertent transgressions. But really, with everything else that is going on in a busy traffic scenario that a driver must be conscious of and paying attention to, a tiny little orange flag on an antenna may escape notice in CERTAIN situations; like the one described in the OP.
This is an interesting post. I grew up in a small town where there was only about 50,000 people. In all of the funerals there, the police were always escorting and stopping traffic at lights making sure no one got left behind or there was an accident.
Of course it wasn’t big problem as we never had to drive more than 10 minutes generally to get to the burial site and there is not much traffic in a town that small.
Now I have been to 3 funerals in Philadelphia PA and it was a totally different animal. We were all given placards to put in our windows and told to turn our lights on and “keep up” but believe me when I say Philly don’t mess around when there is a funeral. One funeral of my Uncle where the burial site was basically out of town I drove about an hour in the middle of the day in traffic. completely through a city of 1.5million people. without stopping once!
I must have personally run through about 20 red lights with a route that you would have thought the lead car was trying to lose us. Believe me when I say that there was no way those around us could accomodate all of us on the roads. We had a procession of over 30 cars and when we got to the burial site I had to sit in the car for about 5 minutes to calm down. It was harrowing!
I don’t know my way around the city and basically was also afraid of getting lost (this was before gps)
I would think that a city of that size probably has about 20-30 funerals a day. There is no way there is enough space for others to stop for everyone.
This is just my personal opinion of course but I would not have been surprised if a cop would have stopped us we were making so many lane changes and turns to get around.
Don’t you understand, you monster?!?!? In those 10 seconds, the deceased got considerably deader. And those 10 seconds were added on to the grieving time, as that ends immediately upon arriving at the cemetery.
I agree with this. However, you are driving a couple of tons of metal around, its your responsibility to be aware of your suroundings.
Patriot Guard rider here. We have police and roadguards blocking out the intersections. Some people stop, some people pull over on the side of the road and get out of cars and hold hands over hearts.
Other people just muddle around without ever noticing.
Or, you know, maybe just don’t be a dick.
I would cut the grieving some slack. You may have been in the right, and it was rude for them to flip you off, but they’re probably not in the most reasonable state of mind. Of course there’s a different between being deliberately rude and just not realizing what’s going on, but there’s no way for the funeral procession to know the difference.
As i think about it, if an oncoming funeral is lead by a cop with flashing lights, stopping may be the best idea. Once he is past, I am going unless somebody is blocking me.
The more I think about it, the more processions seems like a quaint custom out of place in todays society. I find myself wondering how much of a mess if 2 processions cross.
In New Orleans, there has to be a police escort if you don’t want to stop for red lights, etc.
It usually involves 3 motorcycle cops who rotate positions. Two motorcycles at the head and one at the rear. One of the leading cops will block the intersection until the cross traffic has stopped and then move back to the head of the procession.
When we buried my mother last year, we elected not to hire the detail cops, since we only had to go about 2 miles and it was a straight shot with only a couple of traffic lights. We were told that we had to obey the lights and other rules.
When we were turning left into the cemetery, traffic stopped when they saw the limos and waited for the entire procession even though there was no cop blocking traffic. This was just a couple of highly courteous motorists at the head of the line though…they didn’t have to stop.