Tell that to my first car from the 90s.
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Hey, you Brits are behind the times. That 1987 XJ6 of mine had far more structural wood in its makeup than was decent for a car younger than I am.
In the UK the handbrake goes on every time the car stops (including traffic lights and stop signs). That was probably the hardest thing for me as a Yank taking the test to get right.
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Seriously? And they still do that?
Wow. And way too many cars sold in the States have foot-operated parking brakes, many of which also require a hand to release them. Sure sounds like stoppage-overkill to me.
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One argument is that it is safer; for example, if you are rear-ended whilste stopped for pedestrians, the handbrake will help keep you from lurching forward and running them over.
It makes more sense with manual transmission cars than with automatics, and I believe manual is still the default in cars in the UK.
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They have to move everything around on the dashboard to make the car right-hand drive anyway. I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to make a more convenient parking brake while they’re at it.
Hmm. I am suspicious. Typically the parking brake only works on the rear brakes, and I think the mechanical advantage of the hydraulic brakes on all four wheels is not materially aided by adding the parking brake mechanism as well. If anything it just delays the release of the rear brakes.
I mean, if one is idling at a traffic light with the clutch depressed, one might be sitting there without having the brakes depressed at all at a level intersection, but even then you’d be more firmly stopped by applying the hydraulic brake pedal rather than just the parking brake.
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Well… I’ve owned a few cars with a center-mounted (console) handbrake between the seats, but that requires bucket seats; a bench seat wouldn’t accommodate it. (Not that bench seats are common outside of pickup trucks anymore anyway.) I’ve owned three vehicles with a hand-operated dash-mounted parking brake: a '62 Buick Skylark, a '68 Ford F250, and a '94 Toyota pickup (Hilux). My '07 RAV-4 has a console parking brake, and my '04 Sienna minivan has a foot-brake (also with foot-release).
The console-mounted handbrakes don’t have to move for right-hand-drive conversion, but I’m curious to know whether right-hand-drive Siennas have their footbrake on the left side of the right footwell or not. I imagine they must.
Do you want to get to your destination safe and on time, or do you want to win an imaginary pissing contest through acts of pretty aggression dammit!? Of course you live in Canada. American drivers are either raging assholes or distracted ballistic missiles, sometimes both at once.
Um, how much do you think even twenty car lengths is going to add to your trip? More than gridlock?
I think if people knew and understood that driving politely improved everyone’s travel time, they still wouldn’t do it, because they wouldn’t believe anyone else would do it, and they don’t want to be the “sucker” losing a non-existent competition to be first in line for the next red light.
What I really love is when someone drives in two lanes to prevent anyone from passing them. /s
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Problem is it will happen over and over and over. Adjust for correct gap. Someone moves into gap. Rinse. Repeat.
I know this happens. I’m a “set-cruise-control-to-posted-limit”, move to right lane, relax and enjoy the ride. Typically don’t follow as far as I should, just to keep the gap from being filled.
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If more people use their bikes, there will be incentive to improve the cycling infrastructure.
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Yup same here. I5 goes from five lanes, down to three, then two where the express lanes merge back with the freeway. Going south, the onramp to the express lanes is two lanes, then 4 travel lanes and then bottlenecks down to a single lane.
It’s like the roads were designed by someone from the fourth spatial dimension on ketamine.
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It’s the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Kiellor’s monologs, famously introduced as “Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”
More technically it can also be classified as a manifestation of the Dunning-Kreuger effect (stupid people are the worst at gauging their own ineptness, and half of us are stupider than the median).
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You should have used something like “the only winning move is not to move”.
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A. I appreciate any reference to Garrison Keillor; B) Learning about lobster as peasant food and a theory of cognitive bias - win!; and, C) Riding my bike in my small, southern, university town after 25,000 undergrads take over the highways and byways makes me feel like Woody Allen in the car with Christopher Walken.
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I come from a long line of librarians on my mother’s side, but the fiction bug died a long time ago for me. So now I’m like some robot who gathers facts.
I have encyclopedic knowledge of many things. That is to say, I have the encyclopedia article for the things memorized. Which means I barely know about them at all. But there’s a lot of them, so people think I’m smart, when I’m actually not even a dabbler.
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If more people took public transit, traffic would be better! But you should buy a new Toyota instead, because <\unrelated features>!
I drive exactly the way the video describes as propagating traffic jams - accelerating up to the car in front, because traffic is a prisoner’s dilemma and if I don’t 15 lane changing idiots will leap into the gap, leading to the same propagation except I’ll be 15 car lengths further back (which is a lot in gridlocked traffic).
Also, where have I heard about using ant based models for routing traffic before? Oh yeah!
Cologne, Germany has the Green Wave through its downtown, as well. (Or at least it did in the 1980s. Haven’t been there in a while!)
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Have I ever told you about the time I was driving my boss’s Olds 98 through the Great Smoky Mountains and discovered during a downhill portion that the brakes didn’t work any more? So I reached for the parking brake, only to feel the line snap off as I applied it (apparently it was rusted through). Found an uphill entrance to a parking lot that worked to get us slowed enough to safely shut the car off. In retrospect, how scary, but in the moment there wasn’t time to freak out.
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