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I’m reminded of a story somebody shared on reddit years ago.
An arborist, working with his team. One of his crew had the chainsaw kick and come back and severely main him. He’s bleeding so fucking fast. They need to get him to hospital, and they can’t afford to wait for the ambulance to arrive.
The woman in front won’t let them past. She’s going slower and slower to make a point. They’re honking at her, but she lines up with another lane to box them in. That car slows down too.
The guy is fading fast.theyre using his shirt to staunch the blood, but it’s not enough. After several minutes, they finally have an opening they can take. They speed past her little car, throwing the bloodsoaked shirt out the window to slap wetly on her windshield.
They meet up with emergency services - first, a cop. The woman pulls over to talk to the cop about their reckless driving. While arguing, the ambulance arrives. The injured crew member, and the storyteller, are taken to hospital.
It’s too late. He dies.
…don’t fuck around man. You never know. It’s no worth it. Do the safe thing and make space or pull over. Safety over spite.
70 in a 50 zone. Doesn’t matter if its km/h or mph, that’s just idiotic.
exactly, the engineers should never have made a road with that big of a discrepancy between safe speed and listed speed limit
The engineers only make the designed safe speed. Government officials make the listed limit. It used to be EXTREMELY popular for government official to knock 20-25% off the design limit of the road, ironically so they can tell everyone how safe they were.
Traffic engineers in the US make too wide roads that psychologically encourages speeding, the posted speed limit doesn’t matter unless police dedicates significant resources to enforcing it
Everywhere in my town was 25mph until about 10 years ago.
A local politician got a few speeding tickets and went nuts over it, now it varies from 25-60mph. Engineers were brought in to advise on safe limits.
Him getting those tickets was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was so miserable driving so slow on big open roads. I could probably sit down and figure up an insane amount of time I’ve saved over the last decade (if I weren’t an idiot).
Not so great for people walking or cycling though. Higher speeds mean more serious and fatal collisions.
Where these modes of transport mix, 20mph is becoming the default choice in western European countries, there is a global declaration on this. If roads feel like they’re made for higher streets: that’s bad infrastructure design.
https://www.fiafoundation.org/news/stockholm-declaration-focuses-on-reducing-urban-speed
No one is traveling on a bicycle or walking here. These roads are empty, there’s nothing there. I live in one of the most rural places in the country (United States).
It was seriously 20 miles straight with no houses, wide road, 25 mph. In residential areas there are still 25 mph speed limits.
On our 4 lane road, bicycles are not allowed, yet the speed limit was only 35-40.
Where there are sidewalks, the speed limit is 25 mph. If there are buildings, 25 mph.
Empty roads with nothing but fucking trees should not be 25 mph.
In all of my years driving on those roads, I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a bicycle. A couple of those tiny, slow motorcycles, maybe. I guess they call them scooters
And why do you think this is the case? Could it possibly be because the infrastructure is completely designed for cars, and using anything else is just not safe so you’d have to be a madman to go with these options?
Imran sure, I get rural, cars are good for rural areas, but not for towns etc.
Well, I mean, if a person wants to ride a bike 40 miles for 4 1/2 hours to the nearest Walmart I’m sure they could.
About 4,500 people live here and most of them have cars or they’re stuck.
We have public transit but about 30 people use it. My neighbor said it’s a 2.5 hour ordeal to go to the post office when he could be there and back in 20 minutes in a car. He got old and lost his license.
Was gonna cite 85th percentile speed but TIL on drawbacks
Engineers should absolutely include traffic calming features to get people to naturally slow down, but everyone should drive the limit.
Speed kills, kinetic energy is not linear.
Cars are tonnes of metal hurtling down the road. Thousands upon thousands die every year, and since the increased prevalence of massive US style trucks fatalities have RISEN, undoing decades of progress. (Both in the US, and elsewhere)
People driving 20 over the limit are arseholes (or have been influenced by car centric infrastructure and culture). Change my mind.
Speeding is never okay. Just that lots of people have convinced themselves it’s no big deal.
Edit because of downvotes: https://www.bts.gov/content/motor-vehicle-safety-data
Y’all are really justifying some shitty behaviour. Yeah, I get it, streets are designed shittily, and feels like it’s fine to speed (especially, from what I can see, in the US), but this doesn’t absolve you from doing the right thing.
Like, if it were 5 (km/h) over, I could perhaps forgive you. But downvoting me for suggesting 20 mph over is arsehole behaviour? You don’t deserve a licence.
Fuck these carbrains putting their feelings over completely savable lives.
USA is cooked (and Australia, somewhat cooked, since people are buying ridiculously sized cars here too).
Don’t speed, you fuckwits. Better yet, take public transport if you live in a city with cilivised transportation (obviously, not your fault if it doesn’t exist).
20 over the speed limit? that’s ridiculous no one should be driving over 25
I get this is a joke, but speed limits shouldn’t be set by politicians (which I’m hearing apparently is/was a thing?). Politicians have a role to play in getting regulations standards re-written by people who understand the decades of research on this.
Speeding is mostly a design issue, but I still expect people actually follow the rules.
Strong Towns, NotJustBikes, City Beautiful, Practical Engineering, among others have made great videos on this topic.
A lot of people justify speeding, and it’s kinda dumb, if you ask me.
Just because you “feel” it’s safe, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Plus, there’s a fantastic way to reduce road deaths, just have fewer cars, switch to public transport, but that takes a long time to implement if the political will doesn’t exist.
I live out in the sticks, and if I don’t go 70, it will take me forever to get where I need to go. Also everyone else is going 70, so the people doing 50 are creating an unsafe situation. It’s the wild west out here.
😭 I see the error of my thinking Comrade Stalin. I will do better in the future
Fun little Stalin fact: when the Bolsheviks first took over the Kremlin, food was a scarce commodity. Stalin faked being sick so he could have a whole chicken to himself every day.
This one made me bust out laughing. Such a perfect combination.
The previous one is great too. Both new to me, at least.
This comment section is a very good case study in why better public transportation is absolutely necessary: a lot of you should not ever drive.
- Escalates the angry driver situation.
- Takes photos while driving.
Neither driver here is in the right.
I don’t need to be right.
Fuck you Kevin you piece of shit.
Who is Kevin?
Did you even read the post youre commenting in?
Didn’t notice the name 😔
I just let them pass you. Not worth some lunatic you piss off even more and end up shooting you.
If it’s a 2 lane per side road the best way to get them to pass you is to not break check them but just take your foot off the gas until they get frustrated enough to just go around but this contextually sounds like a single lane sitch which you are correct is dangerous.
I’m a school bus driver and the course material (and test questions) for the CDL state this explicitly. If someone is tailgating you, you slow down. Tailgaters are gonna tailgate no matter what, and slowing down means the damage will be less if they do happen to hit you. If that makes them mad tough tittie (the course material does not use “tough tittie” but you can tell they wanted to).
The great irony of people who tailgate school buses is that WE CAN’T EVEN FUCKING SEE YOU BACK THERE. Even in your fantasy world of the person in front of you feeling pressured and speeding up (which never ever actually happens), it can’t possibly happen if they don’t even know you’re there.
I’m not doubting you at all, but how dumb does one have to be to tailgate a bus? As if you can force a bus into anything.
If you tailgate a larger vehicle, all you do is put yourself into mortal danger.
how dumb does one have to be to tailgate a bus?
Pretty fucking dumb but it’s a low bar. The only upside to tailgating a larger vehicle like a bus is that our stopping distance is a lot greater so the tailgater is less likely to slam into us.
Unfortunately for some, that pressure is real and entirely illogical. For the longest time my wife would start getting anxious and frustrated when someone tailgated her and would start to speed up… Only to contue getting tailgated by the same person. Took a lot of insistence from me to not play their stupid game for her to realize that not only was it stupid to speed up for them, but more dangerous and entirely illegal to start speeding just because of a tailgater.
I slow down to allow them to pass me safely and easily.
I would fully agree that confronting a lunatic face to face is dangerous, but the chances of getting shot for driving slow is next to zero.
Just let them go, because they are eventually gonna crash into a cop car and then you’ll see the grest confrontation between fascist pig vs unhinged sov-cit in real time, great show!
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/driver-shot-at-for-going-too-slow-eyewitness-says/804586303/
Boom, it happened one time so it will happen every time
But is not zero
people in my region have been shot at for flashing their lights at someone to tell them their lights were off. that’s why i think escalating a scenario where one or both of you are wielding/controlling deadly weapons/machinery is the only way to go.
This is correct. It’s never worth it.
This is why I’m in favor of public transit. So many people should not be on the road. This goes for the granny under the speed limit drivers and the insane road ragers.
I’ve never understood why people pick on drivers under the speed limit. It’s called a limit, why do we expect people to be over it?
Depending where it is, a figure of speech up to a certain point of where they actual enforce it, most cops don’t even go the speed limit on some roads and highways.
They’re low and out dated as fuck, and mostly just a money grab, again, depending on the street and the limit, for example excluding in front of schools and parks
because they are assholes who think anyone going slower than them is stupid and they are very smart and the speed limit should not apply to such very smart people.
Once she gets to work she finds a sign taped to the back of the car saying “honk it’s my birthday”
I say this to every coworker who asks why I have a car I rarely drive. It’s honestly just less stressful to commute that way. Idgaf about the weirdos at the bus stop for the most part. 90% of them are high or drunk af passed out cleanly. Every once in a while I have to nudge them out of the way to sit but that’s not usually an issue they just grunt and shift and they’re usually too shitfaced to move in their sleep once they’re out again. One is a lady who is always drunk af but awake and basically just uses the bus stop as a people watching spot and tells me neighborhood drama. There’s a pair of northerners who are polite in a northerner way. There were a brother and sister who were sleeping there for a month but last I heard she found a job and I wished them luck and haven’t seen them since. I’ve had a few really good philosophical conversations. One was a guy who had gotten his phone stolen and we chatted about the positive effects of increased mindfulness of the day to day and not being constantly observed and reachable by both your personal contacts and the faceless corporations. I got bothered by one guy but groundskeepers were hanging kinda close and the admins pass me on their way from their cars into the building I haven’t seen him since so either the facility took care of it or the other inhabitants did. Sometimes I talk, sometimes I just eat my Bacon and biscuit from the cafeteria and drink some tea. I’m trying to listen my way through the Bible just to know what’s in it. Right now I’m listening to the long long list of shit you’re not allowed to do while living in an aggressive war tribe in tents the desert like shitting too close to camp or having sex that doesn’t make more babies to keep fighting the other tribes. The cadence is weirdly chill almost seussian.
Yeah, honking at me. And those flashing lights on the roof of their car are really annoying.
what the hells a ɘɔnɒlυdmɒ
When people ride my ass while I am doing (at least) the speed limit I just take my foot off the gas to gently slow down until they go around me. If its only one lane then I will go under the speed limit. Im petty too like that
It’s not just petty, it’s safety.
You can’t influence the size of the safety margin between you and the car behind you. But you can influence the speed at which the person behind you slams into you in case of an accident, by reducing the speed that both of you drive.
When I drive in deer country, especially at night, I will always slow up when encountering a tailgater because I might have to brake hard for an animal and don’t want to hit a deer AND/OR get rear ended - going slower means they will at least hit me less hard. They can go around if they don’t like my speed. Also, statistics show that drivers that stay well behind other vehicles have far fewer accidents. Finally, traffic tends to travel at the speed of the slowest drivers on the road, so they gain little on our curvy, hilly two lane roads.
Using phone while driving… Great.
Fuck everyone who ever touches their phone while the vehicle is on. This shit is not okay, ever.
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The phone is clearly mounted on the dashboard.
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It’s not uncommon for people to record their whole trip for social media, not just take to a picture.
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This caption could have been pasted over a completely unrelated screenshot of someone else’s video for all we know.
Don’t touch your phone while driving, but also, don’t believe everything you see on social media.
Ikr the number of people going “hurr they do phone use” has me wondering when the fuck people lost basic cognitive skills.
On your last point… It’s still damaging because it normalises it. UK has very harsh stance on this and you’d get in shit even for point 1. There should be zero tolerance on this. They’re a dickhead driver regardless. Two dickheads don’t make it right.
Incorrect, in the UK you can touch/use the phone if it’s mounted in a cradle. Touch it un-cradled though and wham that’s instant points even if it was out of battery and turned off
UK is a paper tiger on this.
It’s not uncommon for people to record their whole trip for social media, not just take to a picture.
That’s still a distraction. Even if they don’t intend to upload the entire recording they are paying less attention to the road in order to pay attention to their “performance”.
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I have some great news for you. Look at what took effect yesterday in my state! Using a mobile device, including at a red light, is now a primary offense (you’ll get pulled over for just that).
This just applies to PA, but it’s a pretty big state with a population between Sweden and the Netherlands, so it’s not nothing!
Doesn’t matter if it’s not enforced. We have no holding phone rules in GA and I routinely see people using their phones while driving.
Worse, too often these laws are selectively enforced only when cops are looking for an excuse to profile minorities and poorer drivers.
yeah i was gonna say. they enforced the no texting law for maybe a year here, then they just started using “I thought I saw them texting” as probable cause to pull over anyone they wanted.
They put up cameras to detect phone and seatbelt offences here in Queensland a couple of years ago. It’s been quite lucrative for the state.
I live in PA and I’m not holding my breath for this shit to ever be enforced. I’m a school bus driver and last year I had a local cop pass me when I was stopped with my red flashers on letting kids off the bus. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other - never even saw me.
tbf, going 20 in a 50 zone is probably not a terrible situation to be multitasking in. not at all like multitasking at 50 in a 50 zone
I’m a school bus driver and many of my coworkers use their phones (talking, texting and even doom scrolling) while driving a bus - sometimes even when they have kids aboard. And these buses have internal cameras that are always recording! I don’t understand how they’re not fired or at least suspended for it, but I suppose the driver shortage has something to do with it.
What to do when you have a tailgater behind you:
- Foot off the gas.
- Wait until the tailgater tries to overtake you.
- PIT maneuver.
- Keep driving safely.
The only reason I accept to not let these people pass is if it forces you do something unsafe, like throwing yourself over to the next lane and slamming on the brakes to match speed with the other cars. Otherwise just give them the lane and let them be a reckless ass somewhere else away from you. Safer that way. It’s not your job to enforce traffic rules.
Exactly. You have no clue why they’re speeding either. Sure it could be some a-hole, but it could also be someone with a medical situation, or someone that’s about to poop their pants.
When I was younger I used to stay in the lane. Now I move over if it’s safe, and let them pass. Not worth the chance of accidentally upsetting a psycho.
I agree it’s safer to let them pass, but a medical (or personal) emergency does not give you the right to endanger other people on the road by driving fast and/or recklessly. That’s why they paint priority vehicles in bright colours and put flashing lights on them - to make it safer for everyone.
If you have a medical emergency, you call an ambulance. Yes, they will have to drive to you first, but care starts when they arrive. If the emergency isn’t big enough to get an ambulance, there’s no reason to drive fast either.
Have you seen how expensive an ambulance ride is?
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Love reading threads about driving cause everyone is very upset for no discernible reason.
Driving is dangerous, and intentionally making it more dangerous deserves anger
The beauty of this comment is that it could be in support of either position.
I’ll do something similar to the OP. If I’m doing 29 in a 25 and you ride my ass, we will now do 24 in a 25. I like to think I’ve improved the safety of the local roadway. I won’t negotiate with terrorists.
anger
Is a big reason why it’s dangerous
This is why we should move the horb somewhere and have great big spikes on the steering wheel - the danger should have never been outsourced to others.
I get, i know it’ll never take off, but the current madness of 2T shockers is indefensible to me
Driving is inherently stressful. Hell, merely being around cars is proven to negatively impact your health: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/newsroom/editorial/are-you-noticing-the-harmful-noise
Is this lady using her phone while driving, after speeding by 20MPH and thinking it’s a flex? If she uses it at 20MPH I’d bet she uses it at 70 MPH too! Couldn’t this have waited until she was safely off the road?
I expect this is sarcasm (can’t know, because of Poe’s)
But for anyone genuinely thinking this you can see the dashcam source in her glasses reflection.
I was on a 3 lane highway going interstate. Doing 80 in a 65 on the fast lane. Big rig in the middle lane. Slowly gaining and will pass the bog rig.
Then a pickup is coming up in the fast lane TOO FAST. Easily 100mph. She tailgates me. Now boxxed in with me in front and the big rig on her right. A sane person would go in the third lane and pass us since zero other cars around. But no.
She lays on her horn and starts swaying with impatience.
So I match speed with the big rig. Maintaining the box. She honks ways more and sways even more. Shaking her fist at me.I maintain it for another 2 minutes until my wife gets concerned she’ll rear end us and we end up spinning off the highway or under the big rig.
I give in and speed up past the big rig and change lanes to her wacko pass. They speed off.
Yeah it’s never worth it. You never know what people will do.
Yeah, better to just get them the fuck away from you ASAP than to be petty. They’re not worth the risk since they’ve already established they’re shitty drivers.
Very true. Many people act irrationally behind the wheel. Only God knows how pathetic their life must be that they want to risk life and limb to get somewhere 3 minutes faster.
It wasn’t even about going faster at that point.
I was trying to force them to slow down and go around… Instead they went apeshit.
Truly. I’ve been on the motorway before with a dude seemingly angry about something I did, not sure what, that he was chasing me across the motorway even if I went from lane 4 to 1 and back he was there.
Some people are insane. Best to avoid them even if you can handle yourself as some people won’t let it go and not worth the fight if you’re not immediately in danger.
Yep I’d call the cops at that time. Not fucking around.
