I often find myself behind a truck that is kicking up stones or belching fumes or has a poorly secured load that looks like it could fly off. Doesn't matter if it is going the speed limit, I want to get past it.
If this really was your problem you'd lower your speed for a few seconds, gain a safe 500 meters between you and the truck, and finally arrive at your destination about a minute later than you would if you were just in front of it.
I actually do this often. But in general if I put 500 meters in front of me, I'll have a series of impatient cars overtaking me from behind to fill the gap. So there is still (often dangerous) overtaking happening, thanks to the behavior of other road users in general. And when people overtake, if their speed is restricted to the speed limit they'll be facing oncoming traffic for longer than necessary.
How close do you find yourself to the truck in front of you?
Safe follow distances are, At 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately 300 feet. I'd be kind of shocked that you're getting stones hitting you and detectable fumes 300 feet away.
My Adaptive Cruise Control has 4 distance settings and I use the 3rd, further than most people's following distance, and I've had stones kicked up by truck tires that hit my windscreen from that distance.
I do the same in my Subaru, even at the furthest, the safe distance is choose is no where near the 300feet(approximately 20 car lengths). It's closer to 8 car lengths.
Was curious so I just looked up my car's ACC numbers. Setting 3 is 1.8 seconds and setting 4 (the max) is 2.3 seconds, so about 220 feet at 65mph. As another poster said its pointless to be this far back because everyone else just overtakes you to fill the gap, so you're always braking and accelerating and averaging a smaller distance than in setting 3.
Clearly you’ve never driven in the EU. The usual follow distance here is about three meters, the “safe” one is five, any farther and you’re going to get a stream of cars overtaking you just to fill that void :)
Regarding stones and lose cargo, they would hit you even 300m away as they bounce and quickly lose speed while you’re still flying into at them at 130km/h.
To be honest, I have driven in the EU, but really only on a technically. I rented a car when I visited a Spanish island and really only drove a hundred or two km.
That said, I'm not talking about what people do, I'm talking about what is considered safe.
In most EU countries(and UK) you have different speed limits based on the class of the vehicle.
So for example in the UK on a single lane road a regular car can go 60mph, a car towing a trailer can only go 50mph, but a heavy goods vehicle(over 7.5 tonnes) can only go 40mph.
So on most roads that aren't dual carriageways you constantly encounter a situation where everyone is driving at their top legal speed limit but there is still a need to overtake vehicles.
Under that scenario, assuming 10-20mph differential is sufficient, overtaking by faster-class vehicles hasn’t been affected. Slower vehicles presumably shouldn’t be overtaking anyways, except when dealing with… even slower vehicles (but the joys of trucks overtaking each other by like 2mph difference and blocking the whole road for 10 minutes)
Roads commonly carry traffic at a different speeds than listed speed based on actual conditions, perception of conditions, condition and nature of vehicles and because speeds are often set inefficienctly.
Its not uncommon to see stretches with traffic constantly packed 4+ lanes going 75+ each way.
Trying to put the same burden of vehicles through at 65 with 300 ft between would be a joke. A given lane would carry less than half actual traffic. Bad traffic would become a city wide disaster.
Then consider that you can only impose this on a portion of drivers per year and drivers have to drive with those without governors indefinitely.
You also discount issues with safety by following at an appropriate distance. Trying to fall back 300 ft can only be achieved by driving too slow leading to both passing and people taking this new huge space whist giving you the finger leaving you with even less space.
If we're concerned with traffic throughput then shouldn't we just increase the allowed speed? Why even have a limit in the first place?
I don't understand your point about having to slow down to follow at a safe distance. If I pull onto a highway and find myself _right_ behind someone I can decrease my speed by one or two mph to fall back to a safe following distance. How is that not safe? The car behind me, who should already be either already at a safe distance or adjusting their own distance should have no issues here.
What I think you mean to say is that because you're assuming that everyone else on the road is behaving in an unsafe manner you believe that you, too, have to behave in an unsafe manner. This simply is not the case.
I'm not sure where you are driving (or if you drive anywhere) but you can't actually drop speed substantially with cars right behind you and if you tried to open a space people would just move into that space. Then you don't have that space AND you have cars maneuvering around you. You will have drastically increased your chance of having an accident without acquiring a buffer.
Areas that are already burdened as far as the amount of traffic they can bear, which is basically every major urban area in America, see traffic moving at a high rate of speed with 20-30 feet between cars.
Picture a simple chute in which you are dumping jelly beans one at a time. Even at the same speed of descent you will be able to drop 1/3 of the beans if you wait 3 seconds between drops instead of 1. Everyone trying to keep 300 feet between to be "safe" would create an expanding parking lot behind that would crash the entire traffic systems ability to function at all.
When everyone started arriving 3 hours late for work businesses would fine themselves dysfunctional including critical businesses. People would die because emergency vehicles couldn't move. The mayor would be on TV discussing what they would do about the collective insanity.
Anyway this is an awfully long way to say people do need the ability to control the speed of their car in order for the current flawed highway system to function normally. People do actually have cause to pass. They sometimes do have a reason to drive slower than the limit. Others need to exceed it briefly or in an emergency.
Perhaps parent isn’t talking about that scenario. But surely you can imagine a different scenario where this applies, right? Maybe Grandma Jones doing 10 under the limit on a two-lane road?
I’m in the US. If you’re on say hwy 395 heading to Mammoth Mountain, the highway is frequently one lane in each direction. If the max speed limit is 70mph, you may come up on a semi truck doing 60mph and you will want to pass using the lane with on coming traffic. This means you need to do 85mph to pass. For this reason our max speed limit laws are woefully inadequate at accounting for real life conditions.
Why will you _want_ to pass? Is that 10mph going to get you there _that_ much faster?
If you were to follow that truck for all 1300 miles of 395 you would get to your destination 3 hours later than if you were going 70mph the whole way.
I would doubt that anyone would want to drive for nearly 19 hours straight, unless you're doing some sort of cannonball run like challenge.
If your destination is a mere 120 miles away, and you followed him the whole way you'd get there only 18 minutes faster. Was it really that important to get there that much faster?
I do - we used to not have real
highways 10-20 years ago. And the main issue with not overtaking a
car-truck that is going just 60 (in your case) is that sooner or later
they will encounter someone going 40-50, and they may not be able to overtake. And because of that uou end up driving 40mph on a 70mph road for hours.
I mean, I have been driving for the last 30 years of my life, I've driven most of the north east of the US. Through highways, timber roads that are little better than muddy paths, country roads that have never been paved, and pretty much everything in between. I've driven 15 hours straight. I've driven up mountains and across (really small) rivers.
Between all the vehicles I've driven in my life I've accrued, got I hate that I know this number off the top of my head, around 350k miles.
Then you have no idea what the rest of us are talking about. Western roads are huge, and travel times are long. When you're driving the ~1000 miles between Denver and Los Angeles, 10 mph difference in speed can make your trip up to 2 hours longer. That's not insignificant, especially if you're trying to do it in a single day.
I'm sorry, did you want an exhaustive list of the roads I've driven? How many times I have driven out west? Which routes? For how long? That's a ridiculous thing to expect from a random on a forum. Should I list out all of the 10+ hour trips I've driven to satisfy you? What level of experience would cause you to retract your simplistic dismissal of my option?
Also, you did not read my post. I specifically said that over the course of those long miles 10mph will cost you 2-3 hours. I literally said that in my post.
You also missed the part where I suggested that no one should be driving for 21 hours, let alone 18.
Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.
It's not always about getting there "faster". I regularly encounter trucks with unsecured loads, drivers visibly weaving, and other dangerous situations. I'm certainly not going to die on some "well this is the speed limit" hill behind them.
Driving isn't some binary situation, you have to constantly predict erratic behavior and react to your surroundings.
> Why will you _want_ to pass? Is that 10mph going to get you there _that_ much faster?
Actually yes. That truck that's going 60 on the flats is going to be doing much less than that on the hills. Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.
Keep in mind that 3 hours @ 60 mph is 3 hours with another car on the road. To compensate you'd need another lane for 180 miles, not cheap. Also the rush of passing when a truck slows down is avoided. Additionally it's safer to pass when the speed differences are lower.
Seems better for everyone involved to let cars pass. It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
> Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.
How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.
> It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
> How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.
Instead of having an ever growing queue of cars that try to pass on the hill, they pass before hand on the flats. So there's not mass chaos when 100 cars who have been trying at 10 mph under the speed limit for an hour all try to pass on the uphill, while the truck is slowing from 60-40.
> If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
Sure, some do that, it's the drivers choice. Personally if passing is allowed, I like to pass slower vehicles. My car accelerates quickly, so I like to pass quickly and spend the minimum amount of time in the oncoming traffic lane.
Just seems natural to let the cars get ahead whenever they can, after all the cars usually have a different speed limit than the trucks. Thus the carefully engineered lane markers, truck specific speed signs, and often passing lanes on the hills.
A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue.
By that logic, that the time vehicles are on the road are necessarily limiting capacity of the system, then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?
I mean, it's only 3 times the kinetic energy (over 70mph), so any crash would be that much more dangerous/deadly. It's also very wasteful with respect to fuel, so you'd need to stop more often which would decrease your average speed.
Regardless, all of you all drive way too fast as is. It's not safe, it's not efficient.
> A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue
Sure, but not 100%.
I'm not arguing that speed limits are useless. Just that the speed limits have always been for steady state driving. You can drive all day at them and never get a speeding ticket. However in the interest of safety you should be able to exceed them to pass, this gets the pass over more quickly and is safer and less frustrating for everyone involved.
> A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue.
You'll often see heavy truck that's not only slow uphill but also slow downhill, in some cases even more so - because it can't afford to build up speed above what its breaks can handle.
And these passing lanes are _never_ in downhill direction.
>> then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?
I mean, Poland has 90mph speed limit on motorways and yet it's still safer than US which generally has very low speed limits everywhere. The only reasonable conclusion is that safety isn't directly correlated to the speed limits but to the state of infrastructure, driver training and culture.
if the car is going slower than the limit but you have a very limited window of time to pass it, the only way is to temporarily go above the speed limit.
If they're going so much slower than the limit that it's unsafe, wouldn't it be easy to pass at the regulated limit?
If they're going just a _little_ bit slower than the limit, why pass them? Are you telling me that 3kmph, or even 10kmph, slower than the limit is slow enough to make an appreciable difference to your everyday driving?
