Hard-braking is usually an indicator of bad drivers.
Though I’ve seen some roads that seem like they were designed to cause accidents.
There was one off-ramp in downtown Houston my dad took with me. It was a ramp that led to another elevated highway, so it was pretty far off the ground. But you don’t see until you’re already in it just how sharp the one-lane turn is…
I had never seen him get that close to losing his cool while driving before. He had to half his speed immediately coming off main artery to avoid drifting into the wall. A wall which had multiple tire mark going up it to the top of the wall.
I will always wonder if anyone ever got slingshotted over that wall and off the freeway by that shitty Marble Madness exit ramp.
Similar story: Offramp on a highway I relatively often use, starts with a nice and smooth turn until about 2/3 of the way when it suddenly gets sharper by a lot. Going by the speedlimit indicated by the signs at the start of the offramp is fast enough to lose control.
My headcanon is that during construction the measurements where taken wrong and instead of rebuilding the section to properly fit an offramp, people just continued by building a sharper turn.
My headcanon is that during construction the measurements where taken wrong and instead of rebuilding the section to properly fit an offramp, people just continued by building a sharper turn.
I believe it. They redid a sweeping highway interchange overpass here, and several months after they finished, after numerous cars had crashed straight into the bridge wall at the beginning of the sweeping left turn, realized that the point where the bridge meets the ramp was misaligned due to a “miscalculation.” This left the road with a flatter ‘X’ shape, and when you began the 60MPH turn and your front tires unloaded over the misaligned section, you lost traction and skid straight into the side of the bridge. They wound up ‘redoing’ it but you still have to slow way down when you go over that section.
Only mentioning this because the thumbnail is pointing out this exact situation. In my opinion a yield sign that does not give the driver a separate lane to help merge into main artery of traffic, shouldn’t exist. That should probably be a stop sign.
I find it extremely dangerous that you never know what situation you’re going to encounter when trying to merge with a yield sign. Sometimes you are given a separate lane and a little bit of road to help merge, and other merge points I’ve driven through locally, don’t give you a separate lane at all, if you don’t completely stop and a car happens to be coming, you will hit them. And sometimes the angle of the ramp makes it hard to see if a car is coming until its almost too late. This situation is dangerous both if you don’t take precautions and completely stop, and also if you do completely stop, but the car behind you wasn’t expecting it, because its a yield sign, and most people are used to being given space on the ramp to merge, vs coming to a complete stop.
Its crazy to me a yield sign has unpredictable results as far as what kind of situation you’re entering into: am I given merge lane or not?
Around the Boston area I see too many older urban highways with dangerously short merge lanes and limited view. There is no safe way
I’ve driven with Progressive Snapshot for a year and a half, and it beeps when braking harder than 7 mph/s (which is nearly the same rate as the study’s 3 m/s^2). In my experience, it’s almost always possible to avoid HBEs by keeping an appropriate following distance and looking beyond the car in front of you. I’m down to one HBE every 4.3 weeks, while driving an average of 118 miles/week. Not to say that identifying locations where many people are
breakingbraking aggressively isn’t worthwhile, but I largely think people follow too closely, and there’s not really a good reason to do so.Edit: spelling
I was taught in driver’s Ed to maintain a 3 sec following distance on the highway. I have a car that monitors it for me and the display tops out at 2.5. I usually maintain 1.5-2s in city traffic. My car’s display gets anxious with less than 0.8… and most of the drivers I see on the road are keeping even less than that. It’s very evident how little most drivers care.
3s is a good rule of thumb for highway. Iirc the CDL manual for my state said 1 second for a 20ft vehicle below 45mph, then add a second if it’s above 45mph. Also add a second for every 20ft of vehicle length above 20ft.
Also add 1-2 seconds if the vehicle on front is a motorcycle, since they can stop on a dime
That’s an interesting feature that I haven’t heard of. Mind sharing what car it is?
That is interesting. I wonder if they’re making the data public as part of the study. 😬
