Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
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They've had somewhat bigger issues in recent years than pedestrian safety.
And yet they managed to build a pair of 16-lane roads that intersect.
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Annndd today's thrills and chills from one nation's capitol...
Weather: 20F, light snow falling but so light there's no noticeable loss of visibility. Wisps of snow on the Interstate.
Imaginary Poll: people are driving at what speed?
- 25 mph
- 45 mph
- 70+ mph
- All of the above.
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my answer to imaginary poll:
i don't care. i'ma work from home today and not have to deal with idiots that don't know how to drive in snow.
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i don't care. i'ma work from home today and not have to deal with idiots that don't know how to drive in snow.
I came in because the snow is snow minimal and I could earn brownie points to use with other "storms"...
... and the boss, who grew up in Pittsburgh, just called because he is turning around and going home.
Claims "traffic".
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Claims "traffic".
riiiiiight.
I could earn brownie points to use with other "storms"...
i earn those through food based bribes.
i love to bake, but eating all i bake isn't healthy so i bring it in and share. for massive brownie points
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i'd say about a MFT
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huh.... that was a pun.
didn't notice that before.
thanks!
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I've never been to DC, but if the drivers are anything like Michigan's, the answer will be all of the above.
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I've never been to DC, but if the drivers are anything like Michigan's, the answer will be all of the above.
Really?? I had always assumed that in the Lands Bordering the Great White North people knew how to drive in this stuff.
(At least for snow < 1")
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Really?? I had always assumed that in the Lands Bordering the Great White North people knew how to drive in this stuff.
as a lifetime mainuh i can say that ain't nobody around here know how to drive in the winter, and i'm still reserving judgement on whether they can drive (full stop)
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as a lifetime mainuh i can say that ain't nobody around here know how to drive in the winter, and i'm still reserving judgement on whether they can drive (full stop)
The same applies to Texas.
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Really?? I had always assumed that in the Lands Bordering the Great White North people knew how to drive in this stuff. (At least for snow < 1")
They in general do, but there are some snow-specific anti-patterns:
- Driving 20 mph slower than everyone else even though the roads have already been cleared and salted.
- Thinking that having all-wheel-drive means that you can drive as fast as you want.
- Trying to drive a rear-drive muscle car in heavy snow.
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Gonna have to go with ANSWER_NOT_FOUND
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Trying to drive a rear-drive muscle car in heavy snow.
I drove a 400HP Dodge Challenger for four winters here in Buffalo. I had good snow tires on it and it drove as well as any front wheel drive car in the snow.My biggest snow driving pet peeve is when a two-lane highway has one lane cleared down to the blacktop from traffic and the other lane has six inches of loose snow - and there is some idiot driving much too slow in the good lane.
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Imaginary Poll: people are driving at what speed?
Which is the most stupidly dangerous option? I'll pick that…
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Which is the most stupidly dangerous option? I'll pick that…
From my POV, the most stupidly dangerous option was 25 mph...
it ensured that I would get stuck behind you and get tail-gated by someone who figures it'll be safer if our bumpers are already touching before the accident...
Filed under: before you ask, I drive a small car, not an Uber-truck that would camouflage/hide the slow guy in front of me.
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I came in because the snow is snow minimal
We were forecast to get about an inch here, but it looks more like 3 or 4.
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I don't know about DC, but around here?
- If it is the first snow that winter, 10 km/h
- If it is any further snow that winter, 130 km/h
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Possibly mildly amusing vehicle story:
I have one of these hitch covers on my pickup. It's made of aluminum. Several days ago I bent it because I backed up to a concrete half-wall and bumped it while parking. Then yesterday I bumped the concrete wall in the back of my garage while parking, and that second bump straightened it back out.
I normally don't bump the wall in my garage, I'm pretty good about stopping an inch or two short even without a backup sensor. I guess I was too focused on not running over my motorcycle while trying to slide in next to it.
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I don't know about DC, but around here?
DC traffic is one the edge of complete shutdown in the best of weather.
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From my POV, the most stupidly dangerous option was 25 mph...
If everyone was doing that, it wouldn't be nearly so dangerous. It's the mix that is insane.
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We were forecast to get about an inch here, but it looks more like 3 or 4.
Well your here ~= my here...
Yesterday my forecasting service was giving totals of 3-4",
starting after I leave for work and ending before I come home, so I call it "minimal".Oh, wait. The driving is the easy part... everybody else, that's the hard part.
FWIW: the beltway was fine (road-wise), but everything off the beltway was already covered and packed down at 6 am.
Does Virginia pay anybody to clear roads?
"Back in the Day" after one blizfiasco the newsies passed along the information that Virginia snow plowing was contracted out - mostly to folks living away from DC - for this one storm, the highway folks didn't call the plows until it was too late, and they couldn't even make it to NoVa until the storm was over.
Is that still how it works?
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Is that still how it works?
Last year they were typically pretty good about it. Well, for main-ish roads. Residential streets not so much. It looked like they had pre-treated main roads around here yesterday by about 5pm. I work from home, so I usually don't get involved.
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The same applies to Texas.
The same applies to any geographic area in which I've lived or visited.
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From my POV, the most stupidly dangerous option was 25 mph...
Speaking of bad winter driving ...
I used to live in Utah. They had the craziest sense of a "safe speed". In perfect driving conditions, average traffic speed was about 10 MPH under the limit. In a snowstorm when visibility was about 50 feet, average speed of traffic was about 10 MPH over the speed limit.
Belgium-ing idiots.
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I guess I have it lucky... most people around here don't drive like idiots during snowstorms.
...unfortunately, that doesn't cover the remaining 7-9 months of the year.
Then again, based on me personal experience, my answer to Ijij's poll would have to be "All of the above" as that's what they were doing on the Interstate where I live this morning.
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Last year they were typically pretty good about it. Well, for main-ish roads. Residential streets not so much. It looked like they had pre-treated main roads around here yesterday by about 5pm. I work from home, so I usually don't get involved.
Background: Yesterday, DC-area roadways a nightmare, even with Feds on liberal leave, many school systems first announced 2-hour delays and then switched to closed.
The whole way home yesterday, every highway department and school system kept saying "but, but, the forecast said it was only going to be 1 inch, and then all of you were driving on it and we couldn't fix it!!!"
- Funny, the forecasts I looked at said 2-4"...
- Maybe you could look at history and err on the side of more snow instead of less.
Filed under: blame shifting and poor requirements.
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Funny, the forecasts I looked at said 2-4"...
Where did you see that? Everything I saw for my area, which could have been very different than your area, was <=1".
Maybe you could look at history and err on the side of more snow instead of less.
I think they got overly sensitive to last year where they took a ton of criticism for being cancel happy. Now, at least, they have a recent data point to counter the "one snowflake" whiners.
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Where did you see that? Everything I saw for my area, which could have been very different than your area, was <=1".
For both NoVA and North, forecast.io (the one I usually use and believe) showed 2-4" when I checked, and other sites, weather.com and WTOP all showed 1-3".
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forecast.io
Cool. Never seen that before.
weather.com and WTOP all showed 1-3".
I tend to use weather.com for the most part, and my local forecast showed <=1" up to Monday evening.
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Why don't you just go to the horse's mouth?
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Why don't you just go to the horse's mouth?
Mostly[1] loads faster. Localized enough that hyper-local data seems to be spot on...
[1] gets futzed up if IE (yes, i know) is rendering another site in some compatibility mode. Haven't debugged, easier to hit "new session" and move on.
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Mostly[1] loads faster. Localized enough that hyper-local data seems to be spot on...
[1] gets futzed up if IE (yes, i know) is rendering another site in some compatibility mode. Haven't debugged, easier to hit "new session" and move on.
I personally use the NWS for forecasts and radar imagery (they also have a very nice Doppler University subsite that will teach you the basics of interpreting all the various products a WSR-88D spits out), and FlightAware's METAR feed for recent-historical data (although a better feed of METAR data would be appreciated ;).
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This topic reminded me that I need to go plug my block heater in if I intend to leave work at the end of the day.
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I personally use the NWS for forecasts and radar imagery (they also have a very nice Doppler University subsite that will teach you the basics of interpreting all the various products a WSR-88D spits out), and FlightAware's METAR feed for recent-historical data (although a better feed of METAR data would be appreciated .
The weather-geek forum is over , well somewhere I'm sure... ;)
I just need to know if the rain is gonna start in the next fifteen minutes.. Or if it's going to snow twice as much as everybody else thinks :smug:... (oh, and like happened yesterday!)
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The weather-geek forum is over , well somewhere I'm sure...
I just need to know if the rain is gonna start in the next fifteen minutes.. Or if it's going to snow twice as much as everybody else thinks :smug:... (oh, and like happened yesterday!)
Being a bit of a weather-geek comes with the territory I hail from (Tornado Alley, man...)
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Being a bit of a weather-geek comes with the territory I hail from (Tornado Alley, man...)
I feel like there's a joke/pun here but I'm just dancing around the edge of it...
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I feel like there's a joke/pun here but I'm just dancing around the edge of it...
Let's not get sucked into that particular vortex.
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What I see predominantly by a large margin are bogey drive prime movers with triple axle trailers (22 wheels) because they maximise load for their licence class:
This might get me a badge, but that particular vehicle actually has 16 wheels. Two double wheeled axles with 8 wheels total and 4 single wheel axles with 8 wheels total.
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This might get me a badge, but that particular vehicle actually has 16 wheels. Two double wheeled axles with 8 wheels total and 4 single wheel axles with 8 wheels total.
Do we have a "didn't read the post" badge? Whoosh doesn't fit. Short super single discussion here, along with acknowledgement that I didn't look closely enough when posting that image:
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/driving-anti-patterns-now-with-icing/3300/1717?u=another_sam
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Do we have a "didn't read the post" badge?
If we do, I may qualify...sort of. You still missed the count. Do we have a badge for you? ;-)
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Here's an anti-pattern I see pretty regularly. Some side-streets with a speed limit of, say, 25MPH have speed bumps to discourage traffic from exceeding the limit. The speed bumps are small, and it's quite feasible to take them at the posted limit — springs and shock absorbers do their job — thump-ump — and hardly even feel it. I can understand drivers of sports cars with no ground clearance and racing suspension being careful, but even 4WD trucks with so much ground clearance you need a helicopter to airlift you in and out of the cab slow down to 0.1MPH and inch carefully over the 2" bump as if it were going to rip their bottom out.
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You still missed the count.
16 wheels
16 wheels
I said 16, you said 16... Have I misread something? What have I missed? Gimme moar badges!