At least video game physics is safer than movie physics. Under movie physics everyone in the frame would have been incinerated by the ensuing fireball.
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Are you sure?
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yes.
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It’s for sure a topic that tends to generate strong opinions on both sides. Studies I have seen suggest it increases safety for motorcyclists when done within guidelines. In slow traffic, it seems not a bad thing. In this video, I don’t think the rider has a reasonable margin of safety given the speed and volume of traffic. He’s obviously quite experienced, and would no doubt disagree with me, but it could just as well have been him taking the hit from that idiot car driver, and he probably would have fared much worse than the person in the ‘cage’ that got hit did.
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Yet remains in the lane which everyone coming up is needing to merge into. 
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Which is one of the reasons why I said he didn’t have a sufficient margin of safety.
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Sorry, thought that was just in reference to the lane-splitting, (and agreed there too!) Nice he didn’t get squished though. 
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Eh, doesn’t seem so unlikely, methinks.
Previously:
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Yeah, the Denny’s is on Somersville – approaching Contra Loma
On a two lane freeway, yes. On a three or more lane freeway, left lane is for passing, right lane is for merging and getting ready to exit at the next ramp or two up, and center lanes are for neither. I honestly don’t understand why this isn’t taught in driver’s ed anymore (it was when I learned).
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Going to California’s DMV website paints a very bizarre picture:
A petitioner complained to the Office of Administrative Law that there was no formal rulemaking process for the guidelines, and raised other objections. The CHP discussed the issue with the Office of Administrative Law and chose not to issue, use or enforce guidelines and thus removed them from the website.
The underlying purpose of the guidelines was to provide common-sense traffic safety information.
California law does not allow or prohibit motorcycles from passing other vehicles proceeding in the same direction within the same lane, a practice often called “lane splitting,” “lane sharing” or “filtering.” – https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/about/lane_splitting
It’s not legal. But it’s not illegal.
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Yeah, perhaps the left front wheel (on what is a front wheel drive vehicle), upon impact, got some traction on the other car’s corner-- and, at 50 MPH, it essentially “drove up” the nearly-stopped car, launching and flipping itself.
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Yuuup. It’s a strange catch-22.
It is, for all intents and purposes (or ‘intensive porpoises’ if you prefer), legal in CA and illegal in all other states.
Not only that, one car was stationary and the other moving quickly.
I saw something similar to this IRL once when a truck T-boned the front of a car. The momentum of a big truck ended up using the front of the car as a ramp as ot carried one side of the truck over the hood of the car.
The truck was mostly intact as it slid past me on its side. It was wild. Similarly dumb maneuver, driving like a jackass running a stale yellow light on a rainy day.
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well there’s the answer. yeah, where I grew up (Iowa) we never had more than two lanes per direction on a highway. Maybe in the bigger cities but not out in the boondocks where i lived. also is it too much to ask for people entering a freeway to actually yield to traffic?
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a little off topic but i feel like there needs to be a term… sort of a “murphy’s law” of freeway ramps, that it always seems like the cars entering a freeway come up at the exact same time as you and you end up having a standoff where one person has to slow down or speed up to avoid a collision. Every single time I swear. (I’m talking about 2 lanes per side freeways)
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Did some writer’s workshops in Iowa City, so I know of what you speak. Understandable. And just to be clear, wasn’t taking you to task personally. Many of my fellow Texans (where I live but did not learn to drive) are also unaware of this. I just wish it was taught everywhere in the US, but especially in places with heavy freeway traffic.
To me it’s all about courtesy, exercising common sense and paying attention to the road (i.e. avoiding distracted driving). If there’s low traffic and a center lane is available, maybe cruise there. If it’s rush hour and lots of people merging and exiting, maybe cruise in the center lane(s) or even the left lane on a two-lane highway. If traffic is medium and there’s room to maneuver without a lot of merging exiting going on at each exit, then driving in the right lane is less disruptive. I’m not listing the lane allocations as hard-and-fast rules, but they’re still a good rule of thumb.
Also, bear in mine that when there’s traffic, people merging onto the highway should be trying to get up to the speed of the flow of traffic in the right lane (which varies depending on congestion levels) so they don’t cause massive slow-downs in the right lane (which can cascade across the other lanes like laminar flow in fluid dynamics).
If right lane traffic is as tight as it can safely be given the average speed, it forces the merging traffic to jockey with that right lane traffic for a chance to enter, which causes both the ramp and right lane to slow down resulting in a cascade effect into the left-ward lanes and slowing the entire highway down. If the right lane has ample space, merging traffic has a chance to match cruising speed, enter the right lane and then move to the center lane (if there is one) before the next exit. It’s more efficient for everyone.
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Came here for the inevitable lane-splitting discussion. 
I’m not a motorcyclist. But am a very safe & courteous driver. I don’t like the idea of lane splitting by motorcycles. I dislike the idea of have two more “lanes” added to a 3-lane highway. Two more lanes that I now have to monitor, in which fast moving, rapidly changing, smaller vehicles are playing hide & seek behind me.
I’d be OK with lane-splitting if I’d always had to deal with it. I’d be used to it. And I’d get used to it after some time. But I don’t think the phasing-in period would be smooth.
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I get that it’s technically legal for motorcycles to split the lane like that, but it seems ridiculously hazardous to me. I don’t know if I could make myself do it if I were a rider, and I don’t know why I’d want to, unless traffic was almost standing still.
