Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    I came up with the idea of a switch that would engage the brake lights without tapping the pedal.

    I have a redneck friend who has insanely bright add-on backup lights like this:

    http://www.quadratec.com/Assets/Images/53440/53440-add1-lg.jpg

    He has them setup to come on when he shifts to reverse, and also on a switch on his dash. I have frequently thought about adding them to my vehicle.



  • On the other hand, there's one thing that happened to me all the time back in WA but that I don't see all that often down here:

    I'm stopped at a red light. Some idiot pulls up and stops way too close behind me, to the point where I'm not at all confident that if someone rear-ended them, that it wouldn't knock their car into mine, so I pull forward a few extra feet.

    Now tell me, what would you do in this... wait, no, scratch that. What would you do in the analogous social situation, in which a person who finds you standing too close for comfort, perhaps in an elevator, steps away from you?

    If you're any sort of decent human being, you let them move away, and respectfully stay where you are. But if you're a driver in Washington, you pull forward to close the distance and again stop uncomfortably close behind me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    You know, you can just pull over and let him past. Sure your trip is, what, 15 seconds longer, but it's worth it to save the aggravation.

    Plus, then you can explain to him what he did wrong by doing it to him! Everybody[1] wins!

    [1] for some value of "everybody" that means "you".


  • ♿ (Parody)

    OF COURSE IT GETS YOU CLOSER TO WHERE YOU'RE GOING <no really


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PleegWat said:

    Not sure about over there, but at least here typically your headlights are adjustable. If you think they may be too bright, park facing a wall and turn the lights on. Adjust up or down as necessary.

    They all are, because car makers don't bother differentiating by not putting in adjustments.

    Some states, like Massachusetts, will actually adjust them during annual inspection. Others I don't think bother. It also may very well be the case many people don't know about that feature.

    I keep thinking that one day I'll go into my next inspection and ask the guy to move them up as high as they can legally go, because they're annoyingly low.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I have no sympathy for crazy cyclists, I just hope when they crash and die they don't hit my car in the process.

    Stop blaming the real victims:


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    Of course some morons are too stupid (or illiterate) to obey the sign.

    Some people are actually malicious, like the FDA inspector (?) in DC in the 70s.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Mason_Wheeler said:

    I look in my mirror, and see I'm clear.

    It probably won't help a lot, but adjust your mirrors outward if you haven't already.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Bort said:

    Stop blaming the real victims:

    So, the poster says "I didn't see him." Are you saying dykes on bikes are the real victims. Asking for a friend.



  • @Mason_Wheeler said:

    If you're any sort of decent human being, you let them move away, and respectfully stay where you are. But if you're a driver in Washington, you pull forward to close the distance and again stop uncomfortably close behind me.

    And yet, in every situation I've ever been in, in a car and on foot, they always inch closer. Every time.

    My strategy when on foot is usually to stand sideways and kind of sway or shift back and forth to get an extra 6 inches of personal space. If I face forward and stand still, the person behind me will get closer every time the line advances until their proximity is tantamount to rape.



  • But probably the dumbest thing I've seen someone do on the road came one time when I was riding the bus, and we were about to go through an intersection (green for us) and this idiot (in a black car) suddenly turned right on red directly into our path. The driver had to slam on the brakes, and if his reflexes had been just a little bit slower, we'd have splattered that guy and his fancy luxury car all over the road.

    PSA for everyone: YOU. WILL. NOT. WIN. A. FIGHT. WITH. A. BUS.

    EVER.

    They're made from very heavy steel construction, to keep the passengers inside safe at all costs. A semi truck would not win a fight with a bus. A loaded dump truck might, but anything less solid than that is going to end up mangled beyond help in a collision. So wait the extra 3 seconds and let the bus go by.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Bort said:

    My strategy when on foot is usually to stand sideways and kind of sway or shift back and forth to get an extra 6 inches of personal space.

    You could bend down to tie your shoe.



  • That only bugs me when I drive a car that obviously is going to slide back on a hill, like my '65 Chevy S-10.

    If I'm in the nice modern Fusion Hybrid, then it's fine.



  • The real victims there are those poor suckers who overspent money on a Harley-Davidson.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Except mine. I have a hybrid. JELLY???

    Considering Ford's website for the Focus Electric shows its base price as being $19,000 more than the base price of the regular version, that is to say, costing so much more you could literally buy two non-hybrid ones for the same price[1], no, not at all.

    [1]Yes, I know about federal credits and the like. Shut up.

    ETA: I forgot you have a Fusion instead of a Focus; but the base hybrid Fusion's still $5000 more than the base gas Fusion. How much gas do you have to save to break even?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    You do look like less of a douche when you don't wear it.

    That's just gravy. Also I don't wear spandex.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Considering Ford's website for the Focus Electric

    1. I drive a Fusion, not a Focus
    2. Hybrids aren't the same thing as electrics
    3. Fusion doesn't even come in an electric version (there is a plug-in hybrid, though)
    4. I hate you.

    @FrostCat said:

    [1]Yes, I know about federal credits and the like. Shut up.

    Sadly I missed the tax credit program. Should have bought a year earlier.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Mason_Wheeler said:

    But probably the dumbest thing I've seen someone do on the road came one time when I was riding the bus

    Not to get in to a game of one-upsmanship, but I can handily beat that one. I was once taxiing in an airplane out to the runway (I believe we were in Denver) and there was a spot where airport traffic crossed the taxiway. A bus pulled out in front of us, causing the pilot to slam on the brakes. A Boeing wide-body will screech the tires, surprisingly.

    I look out the window and the driver was on the phone. Knowing how things go around an airport, and how they take such things very seriously, I cannot imagine he still had his job after that.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Bort said:

    And yet, in every situation I've ever been in, in a car and on foot, they always inch closer. Every time.

    Pretend you're driving stick and also on a hill.

    I like to think of it as continuing education.



  • @Bort said:

    And yet, in every situation I've ever been in, in a car and on foot, they always inch closer. Every time.

    My strategy when on foot is usually to stand sideways and kind of sway or shift back and forth to get an extra 6 inches of personal space. If I face forward and stand still, the person behind me will get closer every time the line advances until their proximity is tantamount to rape.

    I put my hands on my hand to pretend that I'm stretching. Enjoy your face full of elbow.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    4) I hate you.

    You're pretty pathetic.

    BTW I made an edit to my post.



  • @Intercourse said:

    A Boeing wide-body will screech the tires, surprisingly.

    How a Million Pound 747-8 Tests It's Brakes – 02:52
    — WindowsAuraX

    A 747's brakes will stop anything. Anything. A dinosaur. That big tank thing that drove the Space Shuttle around. The tides.

    They'll catch fire afterwards, but.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @chubertdev said:

    Enjoy your face full of elbow.

    Ace of Spades style?



  • Sacrificial brakes, when used in an emergency.



  • To answer your dumb question with what you will undoubtedly consider a dumb answer, I'd have to say $5000 worth of gas.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    To answer your dumb question with what you will undoubtedly consider a dumb answer, I'd have to say $5000 worth of gas.

    So did you buy the car to save money long-term, or because you're a smug asshole?

    It was actually the essence of a serious question. I can't help it if you are this guy.



  • I wish mine did. I usually set it manually, but yeah the (usually correct) speed is right there on the maps screen.
    I think whoever wrote the maps software lives in a state where the highest speed limit they could fathom was 70 miles per hour though. Every 75 mph road I've driven on says 70 on the car's system, and the one 80 mph toll road they just built says 79.
    I've often considered what it would take to write my own plugin for the car firmware to do that. Ford is pretty open with letting you read data about what's going on inside the car, but I'm not sure they allow you to control anything.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    Some people are actually malicious, like the FDA inspector (?) in DC in the 70s.

    That's this guy, for anyone who CBA to look it up. Fucker should've gone to jail. More for the job thing. And someone should kick Ralph Nader in the nuts. Oh, on general principles, but a second time for supporting this douchebag, who caused countless human misery because it was convenient for him to do so.



  • @boomzilla said:

    You do look like less of a douche when you don't wear it.

    Yeah, but it keeps me from getting a concussion! I've gone down twice when commuting and cracked my helmet. Once when a car right-hooked me (fucker, I was going straight and entering the intersection when he hooked me. hit and run) and once in the rain (metal). So I don't care if I look like a douche! (Plus I used to race when in college, so not wearing a helmet feels wrong) Now I just walk to the train (plus I have a Fitbit, so that racks up a few thousand steps)


  • BINNED

    I don't know if this is a Texas-only thing, but I never saw it when I lived in Michigan: approaching an exit in the middle lane with the right lane clear the whole time1 and exiting across the right lane at the last minute.

    1What happens when the right lane is occupied? Let's just say that I learned pretty quickly when I moved here not to drive next to other cars if an exit is coming up.



  • @Mason_Wheeler said:

    But probably the dumbest thing I've seen someone do on the road came one time when I was riding the bus, and we were about to go through an intersection (green for us) and this idiot (in a black car) suddenly turned right on red directly into our path. The driver had to slam on the brakes, and if his reflexes had been just a little bit slower, we'd have splattered that guy and his fancy luxury car all over the road.

    PSA for everyone: YOU. WILL. NOT. WIN. A. FIGHT. WITH. A. BUS.

    EVER.

    They're made from very heavy steel construction, to keep the passengers inside safe at all costs. A semi truck would not win a fight with a bus. A loaded dump truck might, but anything less solid than that is going to end up mangled beyond help in a collision. So wait the extra 3 seconds and let the bus go by.

    QFT (well, almost: a loaded truck can do some serious damage to even a school bus, and those are as crashworthy as a bus ever gets).

    @Intercourse said:

    Not to get in to a game of one-upsmanship, but I can handily beat that one. I was once taxiing in an airplane out to the runway (I believe we were in Denver) and there was a spot where airport traffic crossed the taxiway. A bus pulled out in front of us, causing the pilot to slam on the brakes. A Boeing wide-body will screech the tires, surprisingly.

    I look out the window and the driver was on the phone. Knowing how things go around an airport, and how they take such things very seriously, I cannot imagine he still had his job after that.

    @blakeyrat said:

    A 747's brakes will stop anything. Anything. A dinosaur. That big tank thing that drove the Space Shuttle around. The tides.

    They'll catch fire afterwards, but.

    Yeah. An airliner's brakes have to be able to stop the plane from 150+kt groundspeeds in the span of well under a mile during a rejected takeoff.

    Airbus originally wasn't going to put reversers on the A380 because its brakes are that good. After some airline badgering, they hung a pair on the inboard engines, but still: stopping a big plane in a short distance is where all our braking innovations (discs, anti-lock, carbon brakes) have come from over the years. (Airplanes had an early form of anti-skid braking all the way back to the WWII era.)

    To testify to airliner brakes (quoting this article on a Cathay Pacific Airbus A333 that had to land with one engine stuck at idle and the other stuck producing sizeable quantities of power due to fuel contamination clogging/jamming the fuel control valves in both engines):
    @http://avherald.com/h?article=42a1000b/0001&opt=0 said:

    The airplane touched down at 230 KIAS at a landing weight of 173600 kg,
    during touch down the left hand engine's underside of the cowling
    briefly touched the runway. Spoilers deployed automatically, the left
    hand reverser was deployed, the captain applied maximum manual braking.
    When the airplane stopped the left hand engine was still running at
    76-79% N1. Both engines were shut down, 5 main gear tyres deflated.

    Keep in mind that the maximum rated ground speed for the A330-300 involved in that incident is 206 knots (as in, you are a test pilot/tire tester once you go faster than that with weight-on-wheels still).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dcon said:

    Once when a car right-hooked me

    Not that I would try to argue anyone out of wearing a helmet, but remember the context we were talking about is that cars give a wider berth to people without them. So you might not have been hit if you didn't have it, in which case it wouldn't have needed to save your head.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    They're adjustable but it takes a screwdriver and a lot more effort than the average American puts into their cars. We can't even get people to put fucking AIR in their tires here.

    One of my favorite purchases:

    http://www.amazon.com/Slime-40022-12-Volt-Digital-Inflator/dp/B002ZBWKAU


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @antiquarian said:

    What happens when the right lane is occupied? Let's just say that I learned pretty quickly when I moved here not to drive next to other cars if an exit is coming up.

    ROFL! A few years of Boston driving will teach you how to deal with THAT. Namely, you speed up a bit and edge left like you're in a post-apocalyptic movie. For extra credit, look 'em in the eye with a toothy grin.

    I once forced a woman to slam on her brakes to avoid hitting a parked car in a similar situation to what you describe: two lanes going down to one, and the right-hand lane, which she was in, became parking. She tried to speed up past me and cut me off; I gently informed her that wasn't gonna happen.



  • A "digital tire inflator?" What does it inflate the tire with? Lolcats?



  • Clearly it inflates tires with fingers, and maybe toes.



  • @FrostCat said:

    So did you buy the car to save money long-term, or because you're a smug asshole?

    Hard to tell, it's impossible for me to predict either inflation or the cost of gasoline out 10 years. Also, the gap in price for the Titanium version wasn't that much, but I have to admit I don't remember off-hand was it was. Also I didn't pay sticker. So.

    The point is, I like my car and I don't give a fuck what you think.



  • Floating-point air molecules.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Not that I would try to argue anyone out of wearing a helmet

    Hope not! To me, not wearing a helmet is like not wearing a seatbelt. Insanely stupid.

    Kind of reminds me of an incident when I was skiing once. It was about 10F out, going up in a gondola and a girl commented that her head was cold. Me: "Why don't you put a hat on?" Her: "It would mess up my hair." I was too floored to come up with a good comeback.

    @FrostCat said:

    but remember the context we were talking about is that cars give a wider berth to people without them. So you might not have been hit if you didn't have it, in which case it wouldn't have needed to save your head.

    In this case, he would have hooked me with his front tire instead of rear-quarter panel then. He simply didn't understand how fast I was going. "oh bikes are slow, I can get around him in time". Um, no.

    While I do like the new rule (within certain bounds), I don't like that we're trying to legislate common sense. (That ties into my above skiing thing - people just don't have common sense. sigh.)

    And in case you think I'm a rabid cyclist (well, was. I've turned into the archetypical programmer - out of shape and overweight), I'm just as quick to jump on asshole cyclists who blow stop signs / etc. They're endangering not only themselves (night, no lights, dark clothing, riding on wrong side of the road, on the phone [jawdrop]), but motorists too.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Hard to tell, it's impossible for me to predict either inflation or the cost of gasoline out 10 years. Also, the gap in price for the Titanium version wasn't that much, but I have to admit I don't remember off-hand was it was. Also I didn't pay sticker. So.

    A quick perusal says that the base model and the hybrid's base price differ by about $5K, so it's not as stupid a decision as it would be for a Focus.

    The point is, I like my car and

    Nothing wrong with that.

    I don't give a fuck what you think.

    You know, for someone who's as relentlessly literal as you are, you have a surprisingly low tolerance for people who make minor mistakes.

    I don't give a fuck what kind of car you drive. I was kind of curious to see if you were dumb enough to think you were doing it to save money, though.



  • @Jaime said:

    Motorcycles don't get a whole lot better fuel economy than cars anymore, maybe twice as many mpg on average.

    2x mpg is generally considered "a lot better" than x mpg when talking about fuel economy.

    @Jaime said:

    For every bike that is allowed to lane split, that's the equivalent of about half a car off the road.

    You need to check your math there. They're still on the road, just for less time. How much less time depends on how far they are travelling, the traffic conditions at the time, ...

    In the end, it's going to be a lot less of an impact than you think.



  • @Bort said:

    Stop blaming the real victims

    I hate those ads. About 60% of the motorcyclists I see are driving like fucking morons. Swerving through traffic, changing lanes unexpectedly, not wearing helmets, cutting off cars, following cars too closely, ... you get the idea.

    Most motorcyclists are asking for an accident.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @chubertdev said:
    Enjoy your face full of elbow.

    Ace of Spades style?

    What elbow?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @abarker said:

    What elbow?

    Whoooosh?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Whoooosh?

    Indeed. Consider yourself flagged.



  • My most annoying is that, every time I get on the freeway at an entrance where the lane immediately merges with a freeway lane, there is always somebody in front of me who thinks that it's a wonderful idea to do about 40mph while trying to enter a highway full of people doing 70mph.



  • I'll go post about ramp lights in the bad ideas thread, no wait, the evil ideas thread.



  • @ufmace said:

    My most annoying is that, every time I get on the freeway at an entrance where the lane immediately merges with a freeway lane, there is always somebody in front of me who thinks that it's a wonderful idea to do about 40mph while trying to enter a highway full of people doing 70mph

    Wait, are you the guy who was tailgating me while I was behind that dickweed last night?



  • Related: the person who slows down to 40mph for their exit when the see the 1-mile-warning sign.



  • @dcon said:

    101 is just freakin scarey.

    Driving 10 MPH is not scary. Hwy 17 is scary.


Log in to reply