This drives me nuts on Colorado mountain roads. CDOT can’t figure out which lane is going to be the passing lane. Sometimes it’s the left lane (as it should be) and sometimes the right lane. The standard should be that you pass on the left. I’m lucky that at least on the roads I usually drive, I know which lane ends for a particular stretch of road. I often have to think about it though. It’s nuts.
Can we standardize this please? Different sign and re-stripe it like you do every year anyway.
It’s a real pet peeve of mine. While I do know these roads, tourists do not.
Oh, oh oh. And if it’s the right lane that ends, you often get screwed because someone will ‘pass’ you at .01 mph over the speed limit. And they often have cars behind them. You have to speed up to get over back in front of them, or fall way back behind the cars that are tailgating them.
The passing lane should always be the lane that ends. Not the through lane (sometimes driveways and other access points change that. I understand)
Oh lawdy, idiots and passing zones, yeesh! I recently drove down to California and made my way back up via 101, which always has slide repairs going on so that’s a known issue and I had no problems with the weird one lane spots with the traffic light in the middle of the forest thing and the like. No, what got me was getting behind some dork in a shitbox car who was in turn stuck behind a truck. Now, there are these regular passing lanes through there but they are SHORT, meant basically exactly for like getting ahead of slow trucks. Glorified turnouts, if you will. Except the shitforbrains in the shitbox kept pulling out into the left lane but WOULD NOT SPEED UP TO PASS THE GODDAMNED TRUCK. I managed to hold off my ire for three or four of these then on the next one as the shitbox tried to move left in front of me I flashed brights and honked at him to get the fuck back over to the right and I did what was needed, sped up and got past the truck handily. For all I know the moron in the shitbox is still out there trying to get past that truck. Unless someone got more tired of it than I and biffed the shitbox into a sturdy sequoia tree.
Passing lanes, which used to be somewhat rare, are becoming more commonplace on the Super-2 highways around here. There are signs announcing that a passing lane is upcoming, so both slow drivers and faster drivers know such a lane is approaching. At the start of the lane, a sign clearly states ‘KEEP RIGHT EXCEPT TO PASS’. Which is obviously beyond the comprehension of about 90% of the dickheads who drive slower than the speed limit.
God the one that drives me nuts in the Colorado mountains is the ass holes that drive 5 under the speed limit until they get to the passing lane and they accelerate to 90 through the passing lane then slow back to 5 under on the other side. Something about straight wide roads make them accelerate but once the road turns or goes up hill it’s all breaks for them. I drive 285 regularly and I something find myself doing 100 under to pass a car that was doing 50 at the start of the passing zone.
In the places you can pass, there are folks that see it’s a little bit straighter, and speed up. Since people are not funneled into the through lane, they end up in the passing lane. Or they just move over to it and you need to pass them in the through lane. This needs to be standardized.
Every one should be funneled into the through lane (the right lane). If you want to pass, you need to move over to the passing lane. I don’t understand why CDOT can’t figure this out.
I’ve run across that kind of passive aggressiveness a number of times, incl. yesterday on A1A.
The worst was an SUV with a trailer on the Key West highway 2 years ago, kept slowing wayyy down in the twisties, but speeding up on the straight parts. I was 2nd in line behind him for over 30 min., with headlights behind me to the horizon. I finally got a single dashed line section with nobody oncoming and got around the bastard.
I think they’re the same ones that go 90 on the downhills on I-70, but then 50 on the uphills. It’s not nearly as bad after the huge horsepower gains of the last 15 years, but 20-25 years ago it was rage inducing.
Look, just because your car can go 90 on the downhills, doesn’t mean you should box me in going 50 on the uphill parts. Even the people that would get over to the right on the uphills were annoying. I’ll pass a Subaru with a blown head gasket as it struggles to go 50 uphill, then a few minutes later it blasts past me at 25 over the limit on the downhill part. Then it moves over and we do the whole thing again.