Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
The pool noodle thing kind of makes sense, except it might be too flexible to be a very good guide. The gardening rake just sounds suicidal. What happens if someone hits it while you're riding?
Then they were too close and you can moralise from the pavement/doctor's/hospital!
@Carnage said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
if you are 21km/h over the limit by accident in a city, you really don't have enough awareness to keep driving
Yeah, I'm quite often well over the speed limit (there are some roads here which were built for 40mph and have a 30 limit, or were built for 60 and have had 50 or 40 put on for no good reason), but I know I'm doing it. If you're not generally aware of road conditions and signage then that is a bad sign (no pun intended).
Although to be fair I did do that on autopilot in a market town near my parents when I was stuck up there during lockdown. It used to be 40, and is now 30 - but it's been 30 for like 5 years apparently. I don't drive up there a lot since I moved away, in my defence.
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@bobjanova said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
The pool noodle thing kind of makes sense, except it might be too flexible to be a very good guide. The gardening rake just sounds suicidal. What happens if someone hits it while you're riding?
Then they were too close and you can moralise from the pavement/doctor's/hospital!
If they were 2 feet away, yes they were too close. Without the rake, you had a very close call. With the rake you wiped out and ended up injured.
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
And then they slapped a 50 km/h limit on them.
Why, yes they did include combined red-light/speed cameras! How did you know?
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@PleegWat
He has an IQ higher than his body temperature (in Celsius)
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Well, here it was a mere 15€ fine. They upped it to 75€ and one point to your license (accrue 8 points and it's "Goodbye license!")
This only adds to my belief that parking fines are poorly implemented - not that I have any idea for a better solution. No matter what, the fine ends up attached to the owner of the vehicle. Lend your car to your kid for a job interview? That sucks, pay the fine. Adding a point on you license just adds insult to injury, because now it's possible you could lose your license because your kid parked illegally.
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@abarker said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
No matter what, the fine ends up attached to the owner of the vehicle. Lend your car to your kid for a job interview? That sucks, pay the fine. Adding a point on you license just adds insult to injury, because now it's possible you could lose your license because your kid parked illegally.
Here if the fine is issued by post, it'll go to the owner who then needs to notify the issuer who was responsible and it's then cancelled and reissued to the right person.
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@abarker said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
No matter what, the fine ends up attached to the owner of the vehicle. Lend your car to your kid for a job interview? That sucks, pay the fine. Adding a point on you license just adds insult to injury, because now it's possible you could lose your license because your kid parked illegally.
Here if the fine is issued by post, it'll go to the owner who then needs to notify the issuer who was responsible and it's then cancelled and reissued to the right person.
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@abarker said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Well, here it was a mere 15€ fine. They upped it to 75€ and one point to your license (accrue 8 points and it's "Goodbye license!")
This only adds to my belief that parking fines are poorly implemented - not that I have any idea for a better solution. No matter what, the fine ends up attached to the owner of the vehicle. Lend your car to your kid for a job interview? That sucks, pay the fine. Adding a point on you license just adds insult to injury, because now it's possible you could lose your license because your kid parked illegally.
You can always say that you were not the driver.
However, this might then result in one of several outcomes:
a) Your insurance company might want to talk to you because some insurance contracts require you to register other drivers of your car
b) You are then required to name the actual person driving. If you refuse to do so ("I can't remember!") you very likely will be required to from then on write down all the times this car is driven (i.e. where, when and by whom). Failure to keep such a log will yield an even bigger fine. I'd argue that having to write such a log for a longer period of time would be even more annoying than the original fine in the first place.
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
you very likely will be required to from then on write down all the times this car is driven (i.e. where, when and by whom). Failure to keep such a log will yield an even bigger fine. I'd argue that having to write such a log for a longer period of time would be even more annoying than the original fine in the first place.
Ah, weaponized Gründlichkeit.
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@abarker Heh, that reminds me. We have a point system similar to Germany (except it's 12 points, not 8, but that doesn't matter, the number of points you get for various violations are also different). Thankfully, parking violations don't get you any points, but there are still other issues, like with speeding and other traffic law violations.
If you lend your car to someone, and they speed through a speed trap, you're the one who gets a fine and points. You can avoid it if you tell the authorities who was driving, in that case they'll go after them. The problem is, the Constitution guarantees the right to refuse to testify (they way it's written, it's the right not to testify against a "person to close to oneself", but there's no real definition of that, so it could be anyone), so in theory, you should be able to tell the cops "it wasn't me, and unless you can identify me in the photo your speed trap took, you can go fuck yourselves". Unfortunately, the group of communist shitheads who pass for a Supreme Court around here ruled a few years ago that this protection only applies to crimes/felonies, not misdemeanors, and breaking the speed limit by 20 kph or less is a misdemeanor. (I might be getting the terms wrong, but you get the idea.)
So in practice, you can refuse to testify in a murder trial and nothing could possibly happen to you, but if someone breaks the speed limit in your car and you refuse to testify, you get stuck with the fine and points even if there's no proof it was you and you deny everything. It's great.
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@blek Here they got around that by making it a duty on the owner of the car to ensure that the vehicle is driven within the law. Can't/won't say who was driving? OK, but then you carry the can anyway. Being able to say it's someone else and who that is is the only way to avoid being prosecuted.
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@dkf As it should be. Over here, you may be able to get away with claiming ignorance once (if there's a photo from a speed trap you obviously are out of luck immediately) but after that there are no excuses anymore. And in case of actual crimes (like a hit and run, even if there were only material damages) you cannot claim ignorance at all.
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
And in case of actual crimes (like a hit and run, even if there were only material damages) you cannot claim ignorance at all.
Sure you can. Your right not to testify against yourself isn’t touched by this. It’s just not some magical get out of jail free card that some people imagine it is.
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
USA (the last having lowest speed limit—75 mph ~ 120 km/h).
This varies by state. In CA, it's generally 65 mph in urban, suburban and adjacent areas (specific roads may be lower), and 70 mph in rural areas. In OR, they never raised the state's limit from old nationwide 55 mph limit. In TX, it's 80 mph in rural areas.
It's also 80 in parts of Utah and Nevada (also fairly big states with very little to nothing between towns).
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@djls45 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
USA (the last having lowest speed limit—75 mph ~ 120 km/h).
This varies by state. In CA, it's generally 65 mph in urban, suburban and adjacent areas (specific roads may be lower), and 70 mph in rural areas. In OR, they never raised the state's limit from old nationwide 55 mph limit. In TX, it's 80 mph in rural areas.
It's also 80 in parts of Utah and Nevada (also fairly big states with very little to nothing between towns).
Really? Between where I live and where my folks live there's a decent-sized stretch of "nothing between towns", and the limit there is 75. I don't think I've seen 80 anywhere in Utah.
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"Fixing problems directly in production"
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@Carnage said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@dkf Well, here it was a mere 15€ fine. They upped it to 75€ and one point to your license (accrue 8 points and it's "Goodbye license!") but of course our absolute moron of a traffic minister made a formal error in the wording of the law. Thus it's now open to debate whether it can be enforced or not.
The minister is now talking about walking back on his own law because of protests over "drive 21 km/h to fast inside the city and lose your license for a month" because it "can happen to anyone on accident!"
In all my years of driving I've only been caught speeding once - and that time it did not catch me by surprise. It was also only 10 km/h in the mountains (hilldown - they probably reduced the limit to 60 on that stretch because it's a rather steep incline). So, driving too fast on accident does not count as an excuse in my book - because for all their moaning about "unfair traffic signage" or something, I've yet to run across such unfair signage. Maybe it exists in other countries but here? Nope.
On the contrary, because the fines are so low, pretty much everyone is at least 10 over the limit. With not a few doing 20 over - after all, speed traps are rare and thus you're equally rarely caught.
But what's a gun to the US-American is a car to a German - a Holy Cow.
Jeez, if you are 21km/h over the limit by accident in a city, you really don't have enough awareness to keep driving. And I say that as a chronic speeder.
In Wrocław, Poland, driving >20km/h over speed limit is the norm. As in, it's actually very dangerous to drive at the limit when there's medium-high traffic (enough for changing lanes to be a problem but not enough to cause a jam). There are roads where going less than 80 on a 50 gets you honked at.
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So this happened around the corner from me (slow the FUCK down!):
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
So this happened around the corner from me (slow the FUCK down!):
That would have happened pretty much the same at most speeds for roads like the one being traveled upon.
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
slow the FUCK down!
Speed was not a factor. Aggressively cutting someone off and failing to do so properly was.
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
So this happened around the corner from me
The next exit is where I used to live.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@djls45 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
USA (the last having lowest speed limit—75 mph ~ 120 km/h).
This varies by state. In CA, it's generally 65 mph in urban, suburban and adjacent areas (specific roads may be lower), and 70 mph in rural areas. In OR, they never raised the state's limit from old nationwide 55 mph limit. In TX, it's 80 mph in rural areas.
It's also 80 in parts of Utah and Nevada (also fairly big states with very little to nothing between towns).
Really? Between where I live and where my folks live there's a decent-sized stretch of "nothing between towns", and the limit there is 75. I don't think I've seen 80 anywhere in Utah.
Out on the salt flats between SLC and Wendover (along I-80) is 80 mph. I'm not sure about anywhere else.
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Death Penalty Still Permissible For People Who Drive Slowly In The Left Lane, Pope Francis Clarifies
VATICAN CITY—Following his recent announcement that the Catholic Church no longer supports the use of the death penalty, Pope Francis clarified that it may still be applied to slow left-lane drivers. “It almost goes without saying,” the leader of the Church commented.
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@dcon Looks like the person taking that vid wasn't leaving a safe distance either, since they didn't manage to stop before passing the crash - unless their judgement of what was going to happen was so good they knew their lane would be clear, which seems doubtful.
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@bobjanova said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@dcon Looks like the person taking that vid wasn't leaving a safe distance either, since they didn't manage to stop before passing the crash - unless their judgement of what was going to happen was so good they knew their lane would be clear, which seems doubtful.
Naw, the distance was fine, the person simply did not touch the brakes. You would have heard the ABS engaging if there had been an actual emergency brake attempt.
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Don't do drugs, kids!
(Don't worry about the language, the video doesn't even have sound)
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@blek Nice job highlighting the crosswalk and making me look at the wrong car, person who edited the video.
Edit: to those who haven't watchet yet, skip to 0:10 and focus on the car moving towards the camera.
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@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Don't do drugs, kids!
The last time I saw driving that bad was in one of the GTAs…
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@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Don't do drugs, kids!
(Don't worry about the language, the video doesn't even have sound)
The driver was apprehended by the police.
Kamera ve Vrchlabí ukázala nepochopitelný zkrat řidiče. Šílenec, ulevili si strážníci
Těžko pochopitelnou reakci na banální nehodu zachytil v neděli odpoledne městský kamerový systém ve Vrchlabí.
They refused both breathalyzer and blood test for alcohol presence. I'm surprised you can do that in Czechia.
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@Gąska said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
They refused both breathalyzer and blood test for alcohol presence. I'm surprised you can do that in Czechia.
You can, but as far as I can tell it won't help you, because refusing the test raises the penalty to the level it would be if the test was positive. So they can't make fun of you because you had 2.2‰ or whatever, but you won't get off the hook.
I also don't think you can refuse the test if it's just a road check. You can refuse it only if you caused an accident because there it runs afoul of some non-self-indemnification rule or something and at that point you are already accused.
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@Bulb that sounds pretty backwards of what it’s here.
Here you can refuse a breathalyzer test, but if there’s enough suspicion or an incident involved, you can then be forced to a blood test, I think by judge order.
Driving under the influence is, depending on the BAC, a felony, so there’s no way to assume that without evidence. Innocent until proven guilty.
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@topspin Laws are weird. The legal principles generally derive from Ancient Rome in all of the civilized world, but it still leads to quite different results.
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Soo... this morning I almost caused an accident that could have ended badly in several ways, mostly for myself, because I was on a bicycle. I made an illegal dumbfuck maneuver in complete lapse of judgement. Thank fuck the driver was able to stop in time.
Observe:
Pink is a shared cycling path, brown is a sidewalk under construction, gray is normal sidewalk. Lane markings have been added for clarity. There are none on the road (= it's not true multilane, it's just wide enough). The idiot in blue was me. The thin red dashed line is the way I usually take.
Let's clarify the rules in
Polandnot Poland (i.e., why was I there to begin with):- Cyclists over 16 should take a test and drive on roads (unless traffic density is too high + other exceptions, such as motorways, poor visibility, etc.).
- Cyclists may drive on sidewalks only keeping with the pedestrian flow. This rule is, of course, universally ignored (which is why gubbermint tried to move cyclists to roads a few years ago, rather unsuccessfully).
- Cyclists must drive on cycling paths where possible. There aren't many, most of them the shared kind.
- It used to be that it was not allowed for cyclists to use any other lane than the rightmost, but with the initiative mentioned above it was relaxed to allow cyclists to take the leftmost before crossings for the explicit purpose of turning left.
I still haven't gotten a clear answer from anyone how exactly a cyclist is supposed to safely change between types of roads other than "get fucked", so in this particular place I'm never taking the cycling path (which ends abruptly after 200m anyway).
Now, the opposite side had 10+ cars side by side and coming. It's not a normal situation (must have been railway crossing closed for too long or something). If it was normal, I wouldn't have gone there or I would have taken the sidewalk. I didn't notice in time. Neither did one of the drivers before me, who then squeezed into the right lane to go the (very) long way round. The rest of us waited while the lights changed 3 times. No one from the opposite side was considerate enough to let at least one driver from my side to turn. Right on red is prohibited. At least two cars turned right in the short moment while all lights are red, which means none from our side could squeeze into the crossing.
I should have been patient, it was not that big of a deal to wait it out. Again, thank fuck nothing happened. I believe my considerate cyclist's reputation is ruined now
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
considerate cyclist's reputation
If it's any consolation, that's a bit like a unicorn's or a Snata Claus' reputation. Completely academic, since the subject thereof is imaginary.
Oh. My. God! Some country actually requires education of cyclists. Color me amazed.
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@Applied-Mediocrity Transitioning from the road to cycle paths or vice versa is often horrible and dangerous. It's why I don't think roadside cycle paths are a good idea at all - instead, cycling on the road should be made more friendly. On road cycle lanes are fine because you are part of the normal traffic stream there so drivers know what to expect.
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@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Some country actually requires education of cyclists
:sounds_good_doesnt_work.meme:That initiative has largely failed, of course. Nobody who didn't already have a licence has bothered to get one for cycling, most are still going on sidewalks (occasionally playing pedestrian bowling), and police has had enough trouble with motorized idiots to ever bother anyone else. Which is why it's being discussed to cancel the licence requirement as soon as some time next year. One of the arguments I heard, I shit you not, was "these requirements deter people from choosing more healthy and perfectly green kind of transport". Well, being splattered on someone's windshield is not healthy either, but
.If you still want to be amazed, I was once told to pull over, flashing lights, "pull over now" and everything, but because they had a report of a stolen one. But they just checked the registration sticker and that was it.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
If you still want to be amazed, I was once told to pull over, flashing lights, "pull over now" and everything, but because they had a report of a stolen one. But they just checked the registration sticker and that was it.
A country where the police actually has time to care about stolen bicycles.
Where can I send a citizenshp application?
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@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
A country where the police actually has time to care about stolen bicycles.
My brother recently lived for a few months in Australia (and a few more months than planed for current-events reasons that you can guess...). He got a cheap (second-hand?) bike to get around.
His bike got stolen one day. He called the police, expecting mostly nothing to happen. Well, they were nice to him, but apart from that he was right, nothing happened.
Then one day, he notices his bike in a train station. It's chained to a bike stop, so not abandoned. He's absolutely sure it's his because of some scratches and stuff like that (you know, second-hand...). He calls the police again (or goes to see a police officer around the station, I don't remember) who told him... basically nothing again. You know, they can't act without a mandate or actual proof etc.
But! My brother wasn't about to let that slide. So he puts a new lock on the bike (so that the thief, or more likely the person who [innocently?] got that bike from the thief cannot use it), all in plain sight/knowledge of the police, who I think encouraged him to do so, in a non-official advice ("Sorry mate, there's nothing I can do for you... but you know what? if I were you, here's what I'd do...").
A couple of days later (mostly because he hadn't time to do so earlier), he got back to the station, armed with a saw, and cut through the other lock, again in plain sight of the police who was kindly looking at him (or maybe the other way) all the time.
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@remi Here it's been common for decades to impress the address (postal code + house number, which in NL is a unique identifier) on the bike's frame as a future proof of ownership. Though it's well possible they use some other form of tagging nowadays.
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@PleegWat It's fairly common to have that, at least on new bikes, around here as well (although I have no idea about Australia). But you probably wouldn't care about that for a cheap second-hand bike.
Also, I've always wondered how hard it is for a thief to grind those numbers out. It's not like a car frame where the VIN is engraved in several locations (some of them purposefully hard to reach and not widely documented), AFAIK it's just a single number in a single place. Of course a bike with a grinded-out area would seem suspicious, but there is nothing you can do to prove there actually was a number there (and much less what it was)!
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Also, I've always wondered how hard it is for a thief to grind those numbers out.
I would suspect that grinding them out would severely impact the structural integrity of the bike... Now carefully filling them in and painting over, that would be a different story!
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi Here it's been common for decades to impress the address (postal code + house number, which in NL is a unique identifier) on the bike's frame as a future proof of ownership. Though it's well possible they use some other form of tagging nowadays.
Yeah, my old bike has the postal code + number from the (a?) previous owner. I bought it second hand.
And since then, I've moved at least 3 times, so I would say this is not really a sensible security feature.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I've always wondered how hard it is for a thief to grind those numbers out.
It's my understanding that if the numbers were stamped/impressed in the metal, rather than engraved, it's quite difficult. Even if there is no visible trace of the numbers, a little forensic analysis (light etching with an acid) will reveal them; the stamping distorts the crystal structure of the metal, which affects the rate at which the acid attacks the metal. Whether anybody would bother with that for a cheap bicycle (as opposed to, say, a gun that had the serial number ground off) is another question. Not to mention structural integrity and legitimate change of ownership, as @dcon and @nerd4sale did.
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@nerd4sale said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi Here it's been common for decades to impress the address (postal code + house number, which in NL is a unique identifier) on the bike's frame as a future proof of ownership. Though it's well possible they use some other form of tagging nowadays.
Yeah, my old bike has the postal code + number from the (a?) previous owner. I bought it second hand.
And since then, I've moved at least 3 times, so I would say this is not really a sensible security feature.I think (hey, it's been 30+ years!) I shoved a business card down the seat tube when I had my custom bike built. (A real custom bike - my college roommate built the frame, I built the rest of the bike)
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I've never done it with a bike, but I've marked lots of things with my initials in an inconspicuous place
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@hungrier said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I've never done it with a bike, but I've marked lots of things with my initials in an inconspicuous place
We call that "Wildpinkeln" in Germany. Isn't that one of those things which gets you registered as a sex offender if you're caught in the US?
fake edit: Oh, not that kind of marking!
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Also, I've always wondered how hard it is for a thief to grind those numbers out.
I would suspect that grinding them out would severely impact the structural integrity of the bike... Now carefully filling them in and painting over, that would be a different story!
Even grinding them out would require either power tools or a lot of work. (Thieves are
, unless the expected payoff is large.) And the result will look obviously tampered-with anyway, so police would have cause to ask the "new owner" about where they got the bike.Filling in and painting over will look suspicious also, unless the whole bike is painted. Painting a whole bike may cost more than a second-hand bike, so it's unlikely taht a thief will bother.
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@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
And the result will look obviously tampered-with anyway, so police would have cause to ask the "new owner" about where they got the bike.
If you think that would in any way deter thieves,
."I'm sorry officer, I have no idea, I just bought the bike this way from a guy in a flea market (so no receipt or other way to track them)."
Everyone knows it's a lie (or at least that the buyer should have known they were buying stolen goods), but no one can prove it in any way that would allow police to even just seize the bike, let alone prosecute anyone.
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@remi I'm not sure that it's so easy to get out of that situation. After all, the only reason for someone to (try to) remove the serial number is to hide the fact that it's stolen.
As such, the police would be perfectly allowed to confiscate the bike in order to determine who it actually belongs to. At least over here, the law states that you cannot take possession of stolen goods so you're basically shit-out-of-luck (and money).
License Plate "NULL"
