this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Yes. If these two things are true: 1. A car is stuck behind you. 2. There is no car to your immediate right. Then you should move over. You should obviously not merge into a car, you would use your turn signal and then change lanes like a normal person.
This is because you are not so important that you get to break a common state law in order to inconvenience hundreds of other drivers on the road, because you don’t like that they want to break a different law that doesn’t inconvenience other drivers.
Gladly, just make sure they get the message to not ride my ass or try to zip around me on the right. Also if I'm still actively passing people, I'm not going to move over to a small open space on the right.
If people are passing you on the right, you are in the wrong lane in the first place.
There's a reason they say "keep right except to pass" and "left lane for passing only" and "trucks trailers rvs and busses prohibited from left lane". There's a reason they don't say "don't pass on the right" anymore. Passing on the right isn't the problem, being passed on the right is the problem.
If you are going slower than the lane to your right, you are causing a rippling effect in the traffic behind you. People camping in the left or center lanes when they are going slower than the cars to the right of them are one of the biggest causes of congestion, and it's quite evident if you watch who is at the lead of pockets of congestion.
I don't know how to be clearer, I only pass on the left and otherwise stay right, just not always at the speed people want me to. I like to allow the car I've passed some distance before getting back in front of it, which not everyone seems to like.
I stand by what I said. You apparently do not.
Because I think it's important to make sure the car behind me has enough room to stop should it be necessary? Because they can't wait 2 seconds for me to make a little space?
I don't understand how cars that are supposedly going slower than you are passing you. Both cannot be true.
Unless you are slowing down to yield to non-emergency vehicles on your right, in which case you are a worse and more dangerous driver than I could have imagined.
Okay, here's the scenario.
I'm driving in the right lane. I come up behind a car going slower than me. I wait for the left lane to be clear without any nearby traffic that's going faster, then I pull into the left lane to pass. As I'm passing, say, a string of three slower cars, someone comes up fast behind me and sits on my butt as I'm passing. I finish passing the string of cars and put on my signal to merge back right, waiting a few seconds to build up a bit more space between myself and the car I'm about to merge in front of so they have a safe stopping distance should they need it. Butt-sitter behind me zips into the right lane just before I merge (sometimes as I'm actively merging), goes around me, and back into the left lane. I then merge right.
Where the hell is butt sitter coming from? If the left lane was clear then you should have had plenty of room and time to safely pass three cars.
Otherwise the left lane wasn't safe to enter. You entered slower than the car behind you. You essentially cut him off. I don't blame him for passing you on the right and cutting you right back off. You damn near killed him.
The important corollary of "left lane is for passing only" is that you should never see a lit brake light in the left lane. If he's riding your ass, you forced him to use his brakes.
Even if you’re passing people, you’re probably still obligated to move to the right, by law. You’ll have to check your state laws for your specific obligations.
If somebody is riding your ass or going around you to the right, they absolutely should not be doing that. However it also means you’ve likely been camping in the left lane, impeding the flow of traffic for far too long by the time you reach that point, and you’re considered part of the problem if you’re causing other drivers to pass you on the right to get around you. When you’re driving on public roadways, it’s not about you. You need to do your part to ensure a smooth flow of traffic, so that everybody can arrive at their destination safely.
If you want to drive slowly, just do so in the rightmost lane. They literally have a lane just for you to do that, where you can be free of tail riders, and it’s impossible to be passed on the right.
I don't camp the left lane, pinky promise. I pull into the left lane to pass and someone coming up behind me going 90 rides right up on my ass until I'm done passing, or they squeeze into the bit of stopping distance I've created before merging back right. If I'm passing and already going over the limit, they can damn well wait a few seconds.
I'll pass a semi and have someone fly up behind me going 15+ over and ride my ass. If I don't get back over to the right immediately, they will cut off the truck to pass me on the right. Those are the people bitching about "left lane driving." Very rarely have I ever seen someone just cruising in the left lane with nobody around. It's often impatient assholes who think they are the main character.
...keep right except to pass: if you don't want to drive, take the bus...
I'd say allowing other drivers to drive dangerously does cause inconvenience to others.
What this "slow driver" discussion leaves out is the fact that it's the fast drivers that end up behaving dangerously and causing accidents. Fast drivers are the problem here.
That’s a very common misconception. Driving fast isn’t actually very dangerous absent outside factors like poor weather conditions, balding tires, bad brakes, aggressive driving, etc. Cars are designed to drive straight very well, and their ability to do so is unaffected by a metal sign with some paint on it beside the road they’re driving on. This is why countries like Germany with its Autobahn aren’t decimated by crashes every day.
Beyond this common sense, the data backs this up as well. Speeding is a factor in less than a third of all car crashes resulting in injury or death, and the it’s the cause of such accidents even less than that. Much bigger causes of accidents are unpredictable driving, driving too slowly for the flow of traffic, and aggressive driving (Which impeding traffic in the left lane falls under).
On top of the common sense and the crash data that backs this up, I also worked in EMS for over a decade and in my personal experience, the vast majority of incidents I’ve been involved in were due to somebody turning into traffic and failing to get up to speed, driving too slowly for the lane they’re in, or slamming on their brakes at a yellow light. In 10 years I’d seen 2 fatalities due to speeding, and that was on a residential road, the car involved was a rear wheel drive muscle car they accelerated too fast in without the experience to handle it. The overwhelming majority were caused by “defensive drivers” who made poor “defensive” decisions that other drivers couldn’t predict, or people becoming road hazards in order to self police the roadways.
According to Der Spiegel, German motorways that don't have speed limits feature 17% more crashes leading to severe injury and 76% more crashes leading to death.
That's despite the fact those sections have a lot of measures undertaken to additionally improve road safety.
According to the European Traffic safety Council, German roadways have a fatality rate of only 4.2 people per billion kilometers.
This is roughly half the rate of the US, which is 8.3
German motorways are much safer than the US, despite their high speeds. The reason a higher rate of accidents are caused by speeding in Germany compared to the U.S. is because their standards for driver training and licensure are much stricter than in the U.S. You actually have to attend a driving school and pass exams to become a licensed driver in Germany, unlike the almost total absence of driver education required in the US. They simply don’t have the issue of unpredictable ignorant drivers, or slow lane campers in Germany the way we do here. They successfully mitigated the risk of dangerous traffic flow impeding drivers like yourself, leaving high speeds as one of the only factors left when it comes to accidents. The high speed driver looks like “the problem” in Germany because the much bigger problem driver, including the lane campers, simply don’t qualify for drivers licenses there and are kept off the road entirely. A good problem to have, and one we should implement here in order to save lives.
It is true that Germany has lower fatality rate on the roads, and it is true that it is due to the various policies they implement, including stricter licensing. Speeding is also severely punished, by the way, which is why the definition of a "slow driver" will change a lot compared to the "I don't give a damn about rules" America. A driver following speed limits is not "slow" by any German standards.
But in no way stricter licensing and control negates the fact that fatality rates on German motorways that don't have a speed limit are 76% higher compared to the ones that do, in the absolute very same Germany, not compared to any other country.
The safest motorways of Germany, with a great margin, are speed limited.
Speeding is not the only factor for road safety, and it's important to address this multifaceted issue in many ways. But speed is a very, very big part of it.
A very clever misrepresentation of the data, I’ll give you that. While it’s true that if you get into an accident on a non-limited section of the autobahn , your odds of the accident being more severe or even fatal are relatively higher than it being a minor accident. However what you’re very strategically leaving out is that your odds of getting into an accident in the first place are lower on non-limited sections of the Autobahn.l, with some outliers based on rarity of the various speed limits. The most common speed limit on the autobahn being 120 (substantially higher than the average speeder in the U.S.). Here’s some data from a 2022 study on the effects of speed limits and their effect on accident frequency on Autobahn. It lists several different speed limits and crash results, with the primary comparison being between 120 and none. With the other speed limits being rarer outliers.
TL;DR It’s not that severe accidents happen more often on non-limited sections of the autobahn, it’s just that the smaller amount of accidents that do happen are more likely to be severe. It’s hard to compare these results to accidents caused by traffic impedes, because as previously mentioned that’s a particular problem that Germany seems to have eliminated. An argument could be made that it’s be a prudent decision to add a 120 speed limit to the rest of the autobahn, and trade a higher accident rate for fewer fatalities, but that’s a luxury that Germany has because they’re not dealing with more dangerous behavior like in the U.S, such as uneducated, unpredictable, and slow drivers impeding the flow of traffic.
I know you want what you’re saying to be true, but you’re wasting a lot of energy that you could spend on becoming a safer driver instead. Take all this effort you’re making to find numbers that almost look like they’re supporting what you’re saying, and put it into learning about your states driving laws instead. I’ve at this point put a lot of good faith effort in educating you, but I’m not going to continue poking holes in the logic of your responses.
Did I ever say high-speed autobahns feature more accidents overall? No, I said they have more accidents that are lethal or lead to severe injury, and that's what we should care about the most.
It's pretty weird to compare scratched bumper to death in this case.
And your very statistics shows exactly what I say - removing speed limits does indeed increase both lethality and a chance of severe injury.
They say offence is the best defense. You've done just that - went personal instead of admitting being wrong. I'll leave you at that with sincere hopes you would understand that speed limits, even on motorways, exist for a reason and not because regulators are dumb.
You can try and try to twist the facts all you want, and yet the facts remain. Despite having no speed limit, unlimited sections of the Autobahn are safer than speed limited segments, and both are much safer than American highways, all of which have speed limits, and all of which are slower.
You tried your best to spread your misinformation, but in the end you were proven wrong. You may never learn, but at least you’ve given others the chance to see your assertions proven wrong by cold hard data. So at least it wasn’t all for nothing. Thanks for playing.
How much gap is safe? Should I cut someone off? Is there isn't a safe gap should I still get over?
If you aren't passing someone you shouldn't be in the leftmost lane.
Just try not to be dumb 👍
If you’re asking me these questions, you should just tear your drivers license in half right now. Are you telling me that you’re a current licensed driver and yet you don’t know how to change lanes? Jesus dude.
I think you need to calm down.
An inch is sufficient. No touch? We good.
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