If everyone did that … guess what?
People might know their geography better?
My commute includes six lanes of highway merging into three. I really enjoy a video of 15 cars in a single line driving around a giant circle explaining how the traffic problem is me, and not the city planning.
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The video is a lot like communism. Great in theory, horrible in practice. 'Cuz people.
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That was interesting and clever and I liked how they subtly slipped in a little advertising in the entire second half.
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Recommending that drivers pay attention to the “buffer” behind them is stupid. People have enough trouble just paying attention to what is in front of them. Keep looking forward unless you’re changing lanes and need to know what is behind you.
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80-90% think they are better drivers? Can that possibly be true? I know I’m not a better driver and moreover, I dislike driving. I’ve spent the majority of my life cajoling friends and family to be my chauffeur.
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I enjoyed the mention of synchronized traffic lights in L.A. The only place I’ve really noticed them is on Victory Boulevard in Burbank. Most traffic lights in Burbank seem deliberately programmed to keep you in Burbank. But I noticed around 10 or 15 years ago, that if one observes the 35 mph speed limit on westbound Victory Boulevard, one can catch every green light. If you speed, you’ll have to slow down at the next red light, but if you go the speed limit, the lights will welcome you with a green smile, mile after mile.
Weirdly, I’ve only noticed it actually working in the westbound direction. God knows why.
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My buddy Dan grew up in Chicago, used public transit every day until his 30s, and is an admitted terrible driver. (I had to work hard to break his habit of braking with his left foot.) Whenever he and I travel together, even in his car, he always wants me to drive.
Maybe so I don’t nag him about that left foot.
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That’s how my dad drove too - drove me nuts when caravan-ing anywhere. He (obtusely? falsely?) attributed it to having grown up at a time when there were no automatic transmissions, but that explanation never made sense to me.
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Nah, I think it’s because he enjoys the peace of riding. There’s a calmness to not being in control, to letting someone else take the wheel (HA!), to looking out the window, thinking of nothing.
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I have had to learn that peace. For years, I only felt it when I was driving, or my dad was driving. (My mom loved driving, but was frequently on-edge.)
My wife’s driving sometimes scares me (she’s perfectly competent, but somewhat reckless and aggressive behind the wheel, IMHO), and I’ve had to learn to close my eyes and put my faith in her so-far-reasonably-fortunate hands.
I like to look out the window. It takes my mind off impending doom.
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You ability to ALL CAP and STRONG TEXT while driving is truly inspiring.
Unless you’re the idiot ahead of me who thinks they can text in the fast lane.
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Recently, I had to bike over to the local hospital to pick up some forms. It would have been 8 blocks by walking, but instead it was 16 blocks by the time I had circled around all over the complex trying to find a bike rack. At a hospital, where supposedly they care about things like health. Bah, humbug!
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I’m a texting MOTHERFUCKER1
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When I learned to drive (in a Chicagoland public school) in the “left foot braking” was taught in driver’s ed. It was supposed to be safer for driving in auto transmission cars (studies indicated a savings of 60 feet of braking distance). I don’t know how long that idea persisted, but it was something I only did in class. Here is an interesting article on the subject (from a few years before I learned):
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Wow! It’d be interesting to see the results of a new study, some fifty years on.
I assume that, since most cars still have the brake pedal situated in a way that favors right-foot use, it’s still believed that the right foot is the “right” one to use.
At first I just assumed that the orientation was simply to make it easier for drivers to switch back and forth between automatic and stick-shift cars safely, since the only weirdness that results is stomping your left foot uselessly on the floorboards in panic-stop situations in automatic-equipped cars… but you still come to a stop. I shudder to think what it would be like to have to get used to stopping with different feet depending on whether I drove the Camaro or the Saab this morning.
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Not that you’re ever likely to, but you can see them in Waco, going E on Franklin Ave. You can cruise the whole way into the centre with each light going green just as you get to it.
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I don’t even know how one would study that and eliminate variables like “user habit”.
To me the interesting take-away from the discussion is how quick we are to assume that the way we do things is “obviously right”.
When I took my UK driving test I was docked for hand-over-hand turning, and for not applying my handbrake at every point on the 3-point turn. Of course, I grew up with big American cars where hand-shuffle-turning could take several minutes, and where we called that brake the “emergency brake” and reserved it for emergencies (and maybe parking on a hill).
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Wow, that is different. Our driver’s ed teachers went out of their way to stress that the emergency brake is actually a parking brake, and not to be used otherwise unless you really had no other brakes working at all.
I used to do hand-over-hand turning on the couple of cars I owned without rack-and-pinion steering, but typically I’d install a Brody knob on those cars anyway.
But that’s a good way to flunk the test, too.
As for user habit, yeah, that’s a tough factor to eliminate, given that the basic User Interface of cars hasn’t changed much since the Ford Model A (accelerator pedal and brake pedal: right foot; clutch pedal: left foot; hands turning circular steering wheel; hand-operated gearshift in center console or steering column; fully automatic ignition advance, electric starter). Other than the differences between automatics and stick shifts, and the disappearance of the manual choke in the 1970s, if you could drive a car from the 1930s, you could drive a car from today.
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