0_o How far can you yell back at the person driving behind you?
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Back when I was in college, I remember driving from RI to IL for xmas with relatives when I heard on the radio that a storm had suddenly boiled up out of the Great Lakes and was headed my way. When the snow started, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and pulled over to one of those big service plazas, figuring that by the time I finished dinner, fueling, and stretching out the kinks it should have blown over. Instead, I spent the rest of the evening watching the snow turn to freezing rain and then back again, and literally dozens of big rigs jackknifing and crashing into smaller cars, slamming them into other wreckage or off into the ditches. I decided to grab a room at a small hotel, and the next morning I must have passed hundreds of wrecked vehicles over the next couple of dozen miles, most just pushed to the shoulder to clear the road, some still smoking.
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Motorways here in the U.K. have huge matrix signs over the carriageways that can warn drivers of road closures, fog and other possibly dangerous situations maybe twenty to thirty miles ahead, what are called ‘smart motorways’. These are being introduced directly as a result of major pile-ups in the past. One was caused by a mixture of patchy fog mixed with smoke from a large fire lit nearby as part of the November 5th ‘Guy Fawkes’ celebrations ten years ago. The smoke mixed with the fog made an almost solid opaque wall in front of vehicles heading up the M5, it involved 30 vehicles, five people were killed and fifty-one injured!
Still doesn’t stop people driving like complete dicks, excessive speed in poor weather conditions usually the case.
Several years ago I picked up an ex-fleet BMW in Cornwall to drive home, before taking it to its final destination the following day. I’d checked the tyres were legal, although the rears were borderline, at 1.6mm. About fifteen miles from home it started to rain really hard, on an uphill section of the motorway, the water flowing downhill made the rear of the car start to weave, basically aquaplaning going uphill!
As I was close to the turnoff before mine, I got the hell off right there! That genuinely scared me, and made it abundantly clear just how easy it can be to cause an accident just through poor tyres and bad weather.
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