Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
-
@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@anotherusername said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
putting speed bumps every 100 yards would also do that.
I'll just perfect my bike hopping skills. (Back in college when I was racing, I was pretty good at that - hop up on a curb, over small things. I wimped out on trying to hop trees when mountain biking...)
I still have not mastered that.
-
@izzion said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@steve_the_cynic
Pedestrians do cause quite a bit of damage to your tire rims.As a kid, my first and only trip in an ambulance was because a pedestrian ran in front on me on my bike and I went over the handlebars with the handlebar hitting me in the chest.
-
@karla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@anotherusername said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
putting speed bumps every 100 yards would also do that.
I'll just perfect my bike hopping skills. (Back in college when I was racing, I was pretty good at that - hop up on a curb, over small things. I wimped out on trying to hop trees when mountain biking...)
I still have not mastered that.
Now that I'm old and fat, I've ... um ... lost the skill. Yeah, that's it...
-
@karla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@izzion said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@steve_the_cynic
Pedestrians do cause quite a bit of damage to your tire rims.As a kid, my first and only trip in an ambulance was because a pedestrian ran in front on me on my bike and I went over the handlebars with the handlebar hitting me in the chest.
Kind of like cars and deer. The car is totaled and the deer is fine.
-
@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@karla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@izzion said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@steve_the_cynic
Pedestrians do cause quite a bit of damage to your tire rims.As a kid, my first and only trip in an ambulance was because a pedestrian ran in front on me on my bike and I went over the handlebars with the handlebar hitting me in the chest.
Kind of like cars and deer. The car is totaled and the deer is fine.
Moose are especially nasty--they're tall enough that if you take out the legs in a small car (not a truck), the body falls on the windshield. The moose tends to walk away (and bite your sister).
-
@steve_the_cynic said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Many cyclists behave as if there are no rules of the road for cyclists.
There's, however, one massive counterpoint: The way cyclists are supposed to drive and the way their lanes are designed rarely match up.
If someone in a car was subjected to the sometimes head-in-ass way bike lanes (if there even are bike lanes) were designed, you'd see quite a lot of this behaviour cropping up with cars too.
Bike lanes are often added as an afterthought. And it shows. At least they're improving things sometimes.
For instance, one big junction near me did not have a legal way for bikes to cross the street in one particular direction at all. Basically, you either could drive against the flow or you had to make a 500 meter detour.
Sometimes you even have this:
Or this:
Or this one. Particularly nice - it's a sign saying: "Take care of cyclists!" while being in the middle of the bike lane.
-
@rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
There's, however, one massive counterpoint: The way cyclists are supposed to drive and the way their lanes are designed rarely match up.
For all that that is true, it still doesn't give permission for them to use the road without taking care. Nobody is exempted from that.
-
@dkf said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
There's, however, one massive counterpoint: The way cyclists are supposed to drive and the way their lanes are designed rarely match up.
For all that that is true, it still doesn't give permission for them to use the road without taking care. Nobody is exempted from that.
I didn't say that this kind of idiocy excuses counter-idiocy. But it does breed a problematic view: If the law forces you to break it on a regular basis then after a while it becomes a habit you don't think about anymore.
-
@benjamin-hall said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Moose are especially nasty--they're tall enough that if you take out the legs in a small car (not a truck), the body falls on the windshield. The moose tends to walk away
Try kangaroos. One hit the side of my BIL's car and totalled it and jumped away to jump again. But sometimes they can jump into windscreen even of large vehicles. This doesn't usually end well and any involved.
-
@zemm said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@benjamin-hall said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Moose are especially nasty--they're tall enough that if you take out the legs in a small car (not a truck), the body falls on the windshield. The moose tends to walk away
Try kangaroos. One hit the side of my BIL's car and totalled it and jumped away to jump again. But sometimes they can jump into windscreen even of large vehicles. This doesn't usually end well and any involved.
Kangaroos don't approach half a ton in weight, though.
-
@zemm My father once had a run-in with a low-flying goose. He ducked in time, and it went straight through the wind shield and the back of the cabin, coming to a halt on the first balcony.
-
@pleegwat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@zemm My father once had a run-in with a low-flying goose. He ducked in time, and it went straight through the wind shield and the back of the cabin, coming to a halt on the first balcony.
How often do you people drive around with your house?
-
@rhywden You could haul this, if you've got the money:
-
-
@rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@zemm said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@benjamin-hall said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Moose are especially nasty--they're tall enough that if you take out the legs in a small car (not a truck), the body falls on the windshield. The moose tends to walk away
Try kangaroos. One hit the side of my BIL's car and totalled it and jumped away to jump again. But sometimes they can jump into windscreen even of large vehicles. This doesn't usually end well and any involved.
Kangaroos don't approach half a ton in weight, though.
Moose will total the car, and because the engine tends to go under the body of the animal, the important thing is whether the A-pillars are strong enough to propel the body of the animal up so it doesn't total the driver and front passenger.
-
@rhywden He was driving a train.
-
@pleegwat That was a slightly relevant detail, don't you think?
-
@zecc I figured I'd leave it out and see what happened. I successfully got some entertainment.
-
@blek ERR_BALCONY_NOT_FOUND
Admittedly, to be the RV in the picture I posted actually has a roof-terrace.
-
@karla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@polygeekery said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I resemble that remark.
Speaking buses versus cars...buses usually move very predictably and stay in the right or right two lanes.
On one way avenues in NYC then bikers can go stay toward the left.
ITYM "cyclists" rather than Hell's Angels and Banditos.
And the relatively predictable movements of buses are irrelevant to this discussion. Cyclists in Oxford (England) seem to show not only a lack of respect for the laws of the land as they pertain to using the roads, but also a total lack of sense of self-preservation. One woman was fatally squashed by a large lorry, and her colleagues, interviewed after the fact, expressed wonderment that she hadn't been killed long before. Another rode out in front of an oncoming bus that was carrying, among others, my wife, but this one wasn't actually hurt.
One day I had reason to sit at lunch-time in front of the Bodleian Library while I ate, and I watched the crossroads. I saw cyclists who stopped for red lights then immediately set off again without waiting for the light to change, cyclists who slowed a little but didn't deign to stop, and a few who just piled through the red light as if it wasn't there, with no concern for the possibility of cars emerging from their left (on a green light) and crushing them like grapes. I think in the whole time I was there, ONE cyclist stopped at the red and waited. And every single car (OK, not many, but not zero either) stopped at the red light and waited for it to at least go red-amber, and usually full green.(1)
(1) British traffic lights, following the Starman principle, are:
- Red: stop
- Green: go
- Yellow (called "amber"): go very fast
- Red-amber: go carefully if it looks safe (not what the law says, but what many people do)
- Cyclist: ignore it.
Red-amber is between red and green, and actually means something like "the light is about to change to green - continue waiting".
-
@steve_the_cynic said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
following the Starman principle
Is that why cyclists ride without any regard for traffic, lights, etc? Because they think they're invincible?
-
@hungrier said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@steve_the_cynic said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
following the Starman principle
Is that why cyclists ride without any regard for traffic, lights, etc? Because they think they're invincible?
I think so. They certainly behave like that in some places.
-
-
@rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
For instance, one big junction near me did not have a legal way for bikes to cross the street in one particular direction at all. Basically, you either could drive against the flow or you had to make a 500 meter detour.
Streets around here are often much worse than that. For cars.
-
-
-
-
Some time ago I used to see someone on my way home from work who apparently had one of these things installed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kapFY4ddJg
Except it was on this shitbox, and all three brake lights were flashing. Anyway:
WHY?!
Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone install something that makes a vital signal more confusing? Why would anyone do that in a country where the police will impound your car over much lesser offences (like tinted windows that are fine but don't have the correct stamp)? This is wildly illegal and extremely visible at the same time, the first cop that ends up behind whoever did this will pull them over and hopefully shoot them in the face.
-
@blek Oh, and while this was a while ago, I'm only posting this now because I just saw one of these marvels of French electrical engineering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOcCxKgts6U
I keep seeing this like once a week and it's almost almost always a Renault.
-
@blek Just today, on my way back to Hamburg, I had the misfortune of being stuck in a traffic jam behind a car where the brake lights were faulty - they were permanently on.
Not only is this annoying when driving at night, it's also pretty dangerous for obvious reasons.
Failures like these should prevent the car from moving faster than 30 kph in my opinion.
-
@rhywden You mean some kind of hardware limiter? What if that fails? I agree that messed up lighting is a big problem but I don't think adding yet another electric gizmo to cars already famous for weird electrical faults would help anything.
Regarding always-on brake lights, that's obviously terrible, but I'd say always on is still better than the opposite, which I occasionally see as well. One time I almost crashed into one of these - I was about to take an off-ramp from a highway and there was a car in front of me, maybe 100m ahead, with no brake lights on. I thought "hey, this guy is getting closer way too fast" and then I realized that this retard 1) has no brake lights and 2) he stopped on a highway off-ramp. I slammed on the brakes and I managed to stop quite literally centimeters from his rear bumper. Then I took a few breaths, checked my mirrors and started going around him - and that's when I found why he stopped: he was taking a phone call. See, being on the phone while driving is dangerous, so instead of talking and driving this rocket surgeon just stopped and took his phone call. Genius.
I've also seen cars that had the reverse lights stuck on permanently, that's really annoying too. But there are even cars that can be incredibly annoying even if their lights work as designed. Daewoo/Chevrolet Spark has absolutely blinding rear turn signals, they're huge and they seriously hurt my eyes if I'm stuck behind one. There's also this one older Kia SUV (I'm not sure which model) that has blinding brake lights, and first generation Skoda Fabia is famous for its blinding low beams. I don't know how these things manage to get approved, I don't think my eyes are particularly sensitive...
-
@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
this retard 1) has no brake lights and 2) he stopped on a highway off-ramp
Well, if he was fully stopped for some time it makes sense he had his handbrake on rather than keeping his foot on the pedal
-
@blek It's actually a problem with newer cars - their lights (headlights in particular) get brighter due to advances in technology (for example, LED lights are much more focussed than incadescents) while the car industry somehow managed to convince the politicians not to regulate the shit out of "not blinding (incoming) traffic".
It's particularly bad because the industry also managed to convince the politicians not to mandate automatic beam height adjustors.
You mean some kind of hardware limiter? What if that fails? I agree that messed up lighting is a big problem but I don't think adding yet another electric gizmo to cars already famous for weird electrical faults would help anything.
My car is already capable of detecting a defective light. Also, it's better to default to fail to a safe state than the opposite. And weird electrical faults only happen because we allow the industry to get away with that.
-
@jaloopa No, he was driving at about 80 kph (same as me) for a while, I was behind him for a few minutes. Then he suddenly started getting really close but his brake lights never indicated anything.
-
@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Kind of like cars and deer. The car is totaled and the deer is
fine.dead.FTFY. I think I saw an average of around one roadkill deer a week during my stay in Pennsylvania. Getting hit by two tons of metal, at pretty much any speed, is very likely to be harmful to your health.
-
@rhywden Regarding defaulting to a safe state - I'm not a big fan of hardware restrictions based on sensors. I know some people would like to do things like install a breathalyzer in every car, but there are circumstances where it's perfectly justified to drive drunk and a device like that could cost someone their life. These safety measures aren't aware of context, they can't tell whether the driver is about to go for a drunken joyride or if they're saving someone's life.
-
@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
makes a vital signal more confusing
Does it? It say "brake, you fool, there's an bloody car in front of you" to me.
-
@zecc I can see there's a car in front of me. With flashing brake lights, I can't tell the difference between said car actually braking and the driver accidentally brushing the brake pedal. I mean, I can, but it might take me second longer, and if we're in heavy traffic and in a place where I can't see very far forward, that fraction can make the difference between coming to a perfectly safe stop and rear-ending you. It might seem like an extreme example, but keep in mind that when you move in heavy traffic, you might brake a couple dozen times per mile, and the chances of someone rear-ending increase exponentially - especially since people tend to change lanes so it's not like it's always the same person who is already used to your dumbass vanity flashing brake lights behind you the whole time. It's important for signals to be unambiguous.
Also, even if you think it's cool, they're brake lights, you'll never see them on your own car, why would you ever modify them? Why bother? It's one of the dumbest car mods I've ever seen. It's worse than a fake hood scoop on a Civic - at least you can see that on your own car when you get out.
-
@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@zecc I can see there's a car in front of me. With flashing brake lights, I can't tell the difference between said car actually braking and the driver accidentally brushing the brake pedal. I mean, I can, but it might take me second longer, and if we're in heavy traffic and in a place where I can't see very far forward, that fraction can make the difference between coming to a perfectly safe stop and rear-ending you.
Not really. I was in a situation like that a few weeks ago: heavy traffic, slow going with unpredictable starts and stops, nighttime driving. Really ugly conditions. I dealt with it by keeping a buffer of several seconds between myself and the car ahead of me, so that no matter what he did, I was confident I'd be able to stop in time. And it worked for me.
The guy behind me, on the other hand, seemed more inclined to trust his reflexes and his brakes. That didn't work for him so well. When I had to
stomp on the brakesslow down just a little bit faster than usual at one point, he ended up having to swerve off the road to avoid hitting me. (Even with my completely ordinary, non-fancy, non-flashy brake lights.)So no, I'm not inclined to believe what you just wrote. ISTM that if you drive safe, stupid brake lights don't matter too much, and if you don't... they still don't matter too much.
-
@masonwheeler Everyone others' brake lights help you drive safer, and your own brake lights help everyone else drive safer... the entirety of my point is that modifying your brake lights - or any other indicator on your car - is dangerous and nobody should ever do that.
-
@polygeekery said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
First two seconds before clicking that I thought "buying a car like a normal person" meant "not a SUV or truck, like a retard".
-
@topspin It's not so bad around here, but when I was in PA, I saw soooooo many people driving big, huge pickup trucks (you know, Silverados, F-150s, etc) with nothing at all loaded in the bed. Most of them were super aggressive drivers too, acting like they owned the road. I always wondered just what it was they were compensating for...
-
@rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@pleegwat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
How often do you people drive around with your house?
Taken on a random day on a highway somewhere between New Mexico and Nevada:
0_1514504247082_highway house - no sound.m4v
(Hope the encoding isn't as bad as it looks in the preview)
The house was taking up both lanes, so we actually passed it by going onto the innermost oncoming lane. I think that would be considered a capital offense in Germany, but we have guard rails on the highways.
-
@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
It might seem like an extreme example, but keep in mind that when you move in heavy traffic, you might brake a couple dozen times per mile, and the chances of someone rear-ending increase exponentially
Especially when you piss them off with your blinkenlights.
-
@topspin said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
First two seconds before clicking that I thought "buying a car like a normal person" meant "not a SUV or truck, like a retard".
Damn straight. Full size vans are fuckin' awesome.
-
@boomzilla that was of course with the implied "in the city", where that shot doesn't make sense. If you live somewhere countryside or have any actual reasons to drive a pick-up, sure.
If you're saying those are awesome to drive in the city, you got me.
-
@topspin City life sucks. Suburbs rule. Vans are cool because you can fit your whole family in there plus you can go camping or throw sheets of drywall over the seats. And you can see over most modern poor excuses for SUVs out there.
City's suck for having a car because you can't park anywhere convenient. Therefore, city's suck. Yes, I've lived in a city environment. Never again.
-
@boomzilla well, now you don't sound enough like a retard to qualify for my statement.
-
@topspin I mean...I was agreeing with you. Why buy a truck or an SUV when you can get a van?
-
@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
When I was full-time in the military, my group was on call on the morning shift, so we took the strike force van (a normal VW minibus) to get breakfast. It was also winter and the big parking lot at the mess was very icy. Our driver decided to do a handbrake parking, driving into the parking lot at a decent speed before applying the handbrake, turning the van 90 degrees and making it slide sideways across the parking lot, stopping perfectly next to a parked car.
My group was awesome.