Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
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@remi The on-ramp joins as a lane. One that shortly ends, but a lane nevertheless. And whenever you change lanes, you have to yield to vehicles already in that lane. So the horizontal marking is enough to indicate you have to yield even if the vertical one is missing.
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@Bulb nope, that depends on the specifics of that horizontal marking. If there is (in France) a thick dashed line that makes the on-ramp shrink and shrink until it no longer exists, then yes, this means "yield." But that line could (again, in theory, in practice it's always there on properly maintained roads and highways/segregated traffic roads are properly maintained...) not be there!
Again, see for example Paris' ring road, where on-ramps look like this:
There is no line marking (or no vertical signs either) between the on-ramp and the rightmost lane. In the absence of a specific rule, the default rule applies which in France is "priority to the right" and therefore the rightmost lane must yield to the on-ramp, not the other way round.
My is whether, if such a situation happened to happen on a road designated as a highway (but again, this is purely hypothetical as I don't think this ever happens), there is some generic rule that says the on-ramp must yield, or whether the generic rule would apply (as in Paris) and the highway would yield.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
My is whether, if such a situation happened to happen on a road designated as a highway (but again, this is purely hypothetical as I don't think this ever happens), there is some generic rule that says the on-ramp must yield, or whether the generic rule would apply (as in Paris) and the highway would yield.
Having seen the Périphérique, yielding is a theoretical concept for a lot of the day because nothing is moving at all...
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@Atazhaia said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
And. Use. Your. Fucking. Indicators.
It was a BMW, wasn't it?
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@dkf I'd agree, except that I have had the infortune of actually driving on the Périph' and I can tell you that if you're on the rightmost lane, you'd better be ready to yield because on-coming drivers are going to commit to the tiniest of gaps with the full expectation that you'll let them do so.
In practice, the best way to survive the Périph is to stick to the middle lane for as long as you can, and never, I repeat, never let the (lack of) flow of traffic push you to either the leftmost, or the rightmost lanes. Also, even if the traffic is fully stopped, expect bikes to come zigzagging between lanes faster than the speed limit.
Well, no, the best way to survive it is not to get onto it in the first place, but failing that...
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@TimeBandit It was a shitty car of non-expensive variety. And beige just to have a shitty color too.
Generally here you stay in the right lane unless in the process of overtaking, or leaving room for oncoming traffic to get on the road (which technically is a kind of overtaking too). Driving slow in the left lane is forbidden as it counts as obstructing traffic, because of another rule that forbids overtaking on the right side of a vehicle. Also, staying in the left lane without reason is also forbidden.
As the majority of major roads in Sweden are 2+2 motorways or 2+1 roads this is how it works. In the major cities you can find roads with more lanes (3/4 in each direction in Stockholm for example). But traffic flow in Stockholm tends to be more of a recommendation than a rule so speed limits and such can vary wildly in either direction depending on mood. Generally the more left you are the faster the traffic as then you're more interested in just getting through the shitpile rather than getting off the road soon, but that is not always true because Stockholm.
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@remi Unfortunately, my past experience has been that when approaching from the A1 google, tomtom, and road design both want you on the Périphérique rather than the A86.
I generally prefer going via Luxembourg and the A31.
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@remi I just had one of those on my way home last night (pulling my trailer). Car was ahead of me on the onramp, so I started braking to let him in (braked from 60mph down to 40). Ahole also brakes (to a stop). Fine, I'll accelerate. Good luck getting on the highway with heavy traffic (CA-99 on a Sunday night) from a dead stop from the end of the on ramp...
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi Unfortunately, my past experience has been that when approaching from the A1 google, tomtom, and road design both want you on the Périphérique rather than the A86.
My emphasis and yes, road builders were aware of how Paris-centred the network was when they planned the A86 (to try and reduce that a bit) but they failed to solve it.
It's still too close to Paris itself, so it's full of commuter traffic and thus doesn't flow that much faster than the Périph' (depending when and where, but overall, it's very congested) and since it's further from Paris it's longer. There is also at least one bit (near to La Défense, on the West side) which has a toll which is eye-wateringuely expensive (to their defence, it's entirely underground and cost a fortune to build, but still).
There was another attempt (I think both happened more or less simultaneously and were built bits by bits, which is also part of the problem) to make another ring even further out (the "Francilienne" which goes more or less (CCW from Versailles) N118/N104/A104/N1104/N104/N184). It is far out enough that it flows relatively well. But it fails by having been built piecemeal rather than as a coherent ring, as hinted by the many road numbers, and the junctions between those numbers mean taking some of the "spokes" radiating to/from Paris and they suck and as a result the whole thing fails. Not entirely, it sort-of works for A1/A6 and while on paper a tiny bit longer (in time) is less sensitive to congestion in Paris but... it's not great.
Also in the West it never was properly completed, which may or may not be related to the fact that the nice quiet woodland areas that would have been cut by the road are the most expensive suburbs.
I generally prefer going via Luxembourg and the A31.
Probably a safe choice overall.
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@remi Yeah, it's only for specific touristy destinations (like the castles along the Loire) where Paris is pretty unavoidable.
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@Atazhaia said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
encountered a massively moronic driver.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
notably the Paris ring road does not have those
Yeah, but you're in Paris, so the lack of yield signs is the least of your problems.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
But as a driver, if you were to encounter a non-yield-signed highway on-ramp, I don't think you would be legally wrong if you didn't yield. That is most likely a theoretical question since such an on-ramp should not exist, and probably does not (signage on highways is usually well maintained).
In the US, I think the "yield to traffic already on the highway" rule is usually implicit, rather than explicitly signed. At least, I've rarely if ever seen explicit yield signs on highway on-ramps. As with almost everything in the US, this may vary by state.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
That type of merge is very common on US highways, although usually not quite that abrupt; there's often a gradual taper with enough room for 2 cars side-by-side, although not actually marked as separate lanes, long enough for the merging car to match speed. As with any lane merge, the priority is always to the car already in the lane, with the merging car required to yield. Of course, not all merging cars follow the rules.
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Of course, not all merging cars follow the rules.
The usual problem I've seen on US freeways is junctions being too close together (at least in urban and suburban driving). That means that the congestion around each junction overlaps with the ones before and after it. It also pushes the cognitive load a bit higher; there's just quite a bit more to watch out for per minute.
In Paris, apart from the mess described on the Peripherique (which I left to the taxi driver) the main issues I was struck by the first time I visited were the way people were parking on the inside of roundabouts. (Subsequent visits were less time strained and in totally different parts of the city that were more convenient for the RER and Métro.)
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@dkf said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
The usual problem I've seen on US freeways is junctions being too close together (at least in urban and suburban driving). That means that the congestion around each junction overlaps with the ones before and after it. It also pushes the cognitive load a bit higher; there's just quite a bit more to watch out for per minute.
A common solution employed for that here is a parallel setup.
https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.114576,5.0463918,15.37z?entry=ttuRather than having a single highway of 5 lanes in each direction, there is a smaller highway of 2 lanes in each direction serving the exits, while a second highway of 3 lanes per direction sits in the middle and serves long-distance traffic.
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@PleegWat You sometimes find something like that in the US, except that the express section is generally only a single lane, and it's often HOV-only and/or toll.
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All this talk about ringways reminds me of this mini-documentary:
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I don't understand all that car stuff discussion. Could you explain it using a computer analogy?
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@Zerosquare Discuss token ring networks?
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
That type of merge is very common on US highways, although usually not quite that abrupt;
I think it's rarely that short, this was just a sketch. Though the périphérique does clearly suffer from the issue pointed out by @dkf, that junctions are too close to each other. But that can't really be avoided (well as everybody said, the whole périphérique should be avoided...), that's how streets next to it are.
there's often a gradual taper with enough room for 2 cars side-by-side, although not actually marked as separate lanes, long enough for the merging car to match speed.
Given that the actual median speed on the périphérique is less than 50 km/h, and far less during commuter spikes, "long enough to match speed" can be about as short as on the sketch I posted above.
As with any lane merge, the priority is always to the car already in the lane, with the merging car required to yield.
is quite good at ensuring everything , so if one lane is expected to yield to the other you need to have something indicating it. This can be a yield sign (inverted triangle), a yield line (thick dashes), or painted arrows in the lane that is yielding to the other. Or line markings making one lane disappear, though in practice this is almost always combined with another type of marking. In the absence of any of that, the generic fallback rule applies, i.e. priority to the right, which in this scenario here means the on-ramp has the priority.
I think self-driving cars should have relatively less trouble navigating roads (I said "roads," not "traffic!") than some other countries, because of how our markings/rules are. There are a few generic rules (= that apply in the absence of specific markings) and a general care of the engineers to be , so that I don't think there are many places where the rules are truly ambiguous. Of course, roadworks or small countryside roads are a bit different, but not that much.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
self-driving cars
I was semi-surprised that the automatic speed limit detection in my car switched to a lower maximum speed in the rain.
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@boomzilla Now they have an excuse to never fix the potholes...
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I wonder what's @Zenith's take on this.
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@Zerosquare said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I wonder what's @Zenith's take on this.
"That explains road maintenance policy by the State."
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
How the eF did they manage to make that kind of error now. They must have had downtown Edinburgh well mapped a decade ago and it's not like the stairs are new.
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"Move fast and break things"
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@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
How the eF did they manage to make that kind of error now. They must have had downtown Edinburgh well mapped a decade ago and it's not like the stairs are new.
They're not brand new, but they're fairly recent. The steps don't exist on Street View from June 2023. The street is driveable up to then.
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@dcon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@boomzilla Now they have an excuse to never fix the potholes...
India's road potzholes may be bad when you are driving a car, but many locals use motorbikes (crazy Bernie a non-motorized bike), and we can just drive around the potholes...
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Btw, a road near the place where I live recently changed into a close after street repair. Pillars erected to block the access to B road on one end. I've yet to find way to get this updated to Google Map.
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@cheong said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Pillars erected to block the access to B road on one end
I foresee
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@cheong said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Btw, a road near the place where I live recently changed into a close after street repair. Pillars erected to block the access to B road on one end. I've yet to find way to get this updated to Google Map.
Seems to be a good luck have fun situation to update those kinds of thing. I reported an error near my house (bicycle path marked as regular road) and got a WONTFIX response from Google, even as a local guide with decent standing. Moving locations of businesses tends to be no problem, though.
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@cheong said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Btw, a road near the place where I live recently changed into a close after street repair. Pillars erected to block the access to B road on one end. I've yet to find way to get this updated to Google Map.
I assume Google, like other mapping providers, relies on the local authority updating the data for the street.
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@Atazhaia said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
and got a WONTFIX response from Google
You should just be glad you got a response
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@TimeBandit said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Atazhaia said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
and got a WONTFIX response from Google
You should just be glad you got a response
You can check the status of edits you've submitted from "EDITS" tab of "Your contributions".
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driving anti-pattern of the day: not having winter tires on your work van and still driving like you are on Spa-Francochamps.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
My dad working with snow plowing has a few stories about idiots in cars. And idiots in trucks. And idiots in busses. And in every line of vehicle legal and illegal in the roads.
He still has not cut anything in half, but one he had an old lady in a tiny Asian car hit his front blade dead on and get tossed out in the field to the side of the road.
She blamed him for not yielding, because she had right of way. Nevermind that right of way does not exist in Swedish traffic law, she was on the wrong side of the road, with no other traffic other than the snow plow with huge blinkenligths.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Damn. Usually those captions are click-bait. (link to twitter in the article, grabbed image from X)
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@dcon Yeah, if you see a snowplow ahead, slow down stay behind. Keep enough distance, possibly even the 2 seconds that are commonly recommended for all situations, since the salt they are spraying behind them is bad for your car.
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@PleegWat He wasn't overtaking the snowplow, he was overtaking a truck in the opposite direction and trying to weave back in his lane, but skidded and hit the snowplow head-on except with the side of the car as it was skidding.
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For once, not really an anti-pattern, just a thing I noticed this morning.
I was driving downhill, on a very congested road, next to a truck with a third axle on the trailer that was lifted up. Nothing unusual there, but the thing I noticed is that at some point while the truck was braking (I guess, given the traffic), the third axle came down, and then a bit later when traffic picked up again, the axle lifted again. Given how truck braking works, I think that makes sense.
I don't whether that was done automatically by the truck's systems (it obviously was a recent one, based on its look and its registration plate), or controlled by the driver, but in any case that was amusing to watch, a big wheel going up and down and spinning freely for a bit when it lifted up.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I don't whether that was done automatically by the truck's systems
My understanding was that it is a purely mechanical thing.
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@Bulb What, not even an AI-cloud-based NFT system?
Nifty.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Bulb What, not even an AI-cloud-based NFT system?
If it was, then the driver probably wanted it to happen about 2 hours previously.