Put another vote in with “stupid,” category (also probably not trained to drive properly). I can’t think of a reason for people doing it that doesn’t involve them either being stupid or not trained properly.
We see it here all too frequently, too, and usually they’re sitting right behind the sensor imbedded in the road and not tripping it. We inch forward after a reasonable time to try to get them to inch forward too, and hopefully trip the damned sensor so we can all just go home.
Nailed it.
Their on the phone and can’t be bothered to look that closely at the road. Next time you see one of these situations, just look. They are too busy doing other things to worry about where the correct stopping place is. Red light = stop car, then continue texting in peace until someone signals you to move with their horn.
I guess you didn’t notice where I wrote,
Some are on their cell phones, some are talking to other people, some are just sitting there, some look bored, some are taxi drivers… it’s not a universal thing.
In my experience with other drivers, they’re not mutually exclusive at all, and frequently are rolled all up into a neat little 5’1" female package driving a humongous SUV with a screaming kid or two.
Are these people in small cars or low to the ground cars?
Usually I have the opposite problem of people being too far up and it seems like the bigger their truck the further up they stop.
It drives me nuts when I could easily make a right hand turn except the guy driving that moving wall is almost a car length past the white line and there is no way of seeing if there is oncoming traffic.
Almost all of our intersections have sensors. The lights do not cycle if you don’t move up far enough to trigger the sensor. Its an almost daily occurrence that someone calls in saying there is a traffic light malfunction. Yes, idiots.
Some of them are. There are more small/medium cars doing this than large cars. However, that may be a symptom of there being more small/medium cars on the road in the first place. I’ve seen SUVs and minivans do it too. I think it may happen more with old cars as opposed to newer ones, but I can only try and keep track of so many variables at one time. For instance, I have not kept track of race or gender when peering into other people’s cars because I don’t want to be a part of that camp.
They’re the same pinheads that, when they get to the head of the line in the convenience store, insist on standing five feet away from the counter.
My theories:
Some people have very bad spacial awareness. They can’t locate the front of their car in relation to the mysterious white line. My wife is this way. She stops far back because she sometimes cannot figure out how to stop on the line. She’s not obnoxious about it but her spacial awareness is not the best and she’s not always very good at judging where she should stop. She also cringes every time I pull into a parking space because she thinks I’m about to hit the car in front of us. Then I creep forward another 3 feet and she’s amazed.
The rule of thumb I learned in driving school was to leave enough room behind a stopped car in front of you so that you can see the bottom of the rear wheels. I was also taught to stop on the white line. I think some people might conflate these two rules, so they stop far enough back so they can see the white line. These people are dumb.
I can get behind these. Both of these make enough sense. I was taught the seeing-the-rear-wheels thing as well. I’m just wondering about the spatial awareness thing. That makes sense to me when you’re all alone without any cars around you. No relation to tell your position from. However, I find it easy to tell how far forward I am compared to another car by looking over and seeing if my sideview mirror is close to lining up to their sideview mirror. Then I can determine where I am by seeing where they are. If I were stopped really far back unknowingly, and looked over to see that the car next to me is both on the line but my sideview mirror is far from being lined up, I’d realize I was not in the correct position. It’d be even easier if I saw that there was another car in front of the car I’m next to. Then I’d be really far back. Is that not possible for your wife? Does she not think about that? After all, aside from tripping lights and causing some problems for turning traffic, it’s not a particularly hazardous habit.
Mostly she doesn’t think about stuff like that, because she’s not a spacial thinker. It doesn’t occur to her that she can use context clues to figure out where things are in space. I’m sure she could train herself to do so (after all, we all train ourselves to do so in some capacity) but it hasn’t really been a problem in her life that she’s looking to solve.
I sometimes do it because I’m tall and have the seat right back and if I don’t, I can’t see the light.
Yes, it’s stupid, but I have to say I encounter this exceedingly rarely, when compared to the number of drivers who stop .5 - 1.5 car lengths over the line.
I think it’s the only way to get the left turn arrow into my neighborhood if there’s only one car in the turn lane. I don’t know if it’s on purpose (so the arrow only activates if there’s a line of cars wanting to turn), because the sensor is broken, or confirmation bias, but it seems that the only way to get the arrow is to wait about a car length back.
Well, it’s rude to stand close to people, dontcha know.
Perhaps they’ve had a bad pedestrian experience. “I’m walkin’ here!”
Given the gridlock laws, I’m amazed to see that too, but its true. The ratio is somewhere between 10-20 to 1 from what I’ve observed.
Nobody likes hood dents. 
I’ve been wondering why there are some intersections in my town where the white line is drawn a longer way back from the walkway than usual. It just occurred to me that one is near the law enforcement center and another is near the fire station. I’ll have to see if they are that way near the hospital’s emergency room entry.
Maybe they are that way to keep emergency vehicles from sideswiping you as they turn on to your street when they are in a hurry?
That was my first thought. Easier to leave some space than have to try to back up when a bus or truck can’t make the turn. And if you’re the second one at the light, leave some space for the car in front of you to back up and let the truck through (especially if that car is pulled up too far). Otherwise the intersection could be jammed up for several minutes.