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My pet peeves on how officials make the traffic rules:
1. Yellow trap: You are waiting to turn left at a circular green light. The light turns yellow, and you think you can make your turn when oncoming traffic stops. But oncoming traffic still has a green light. This has not complied with the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) since 2008, but many jurisdictions have not complied with the requirement to eliminate it or warn it with a sign.
2. Freeway entrances without acceleration lanes: They have YIELD signs instead of giving freeway traffic a MERGE sign. This causes many drivers to either get into an accident or become trapped on the entrance ramp.
3. Weaving major movements across each other (streams of traffic changing lanes across each other: This causes many wrong turns and dangerous maneuvers on an interchange. Each driver is unable to change into the correct lane, because other traffic is in the way.
4. Leaving a gap in a needed freeway to please politicians or pressure groups (e.g. Breezewood PA, Trenton NJ): This causes drivers many headaches to please greedy politicians and individuals. It should be illegal.
5. Allowing green traffic signal phases to stop timing at the first gap, or to reach a short phase maximum: This causes accidents when vehicles on high speed roads are trapped in their dilemma zones (locations where drivers are too close to stop, but too far away to clear before the red).
6. Carpool lanes and toll bypass lanes: These reduce overall capacity by pushing religious environmental beliefs on people.
7. Red light cameras and all other kinds of automated enforcement: These cause more accidents. They are wrongly intended to raise revenue. Often the yellow periods are set too short, to trick drivers into getting tickets. They also wrongly remove the right to cross-examine the only witness (the camera electronics) in court.
8. Movements not provided at traffic interchanges: These attempts to save money cause anxiety, wasted mileage, and traffic accidents, as drivers end up going in directions they did not want to go. Often drivers using maps do not realize they are approaching a partial interchange, and intend to make movements not provided.
9. Signs installed in the wrong place (e.g. post mounted signs intended for overhead use): Too many laymen design traffic control installations. But some politicians force the issue by prohibiting overhead signs for aesthetic reasons. In my town, overhead lane use signs were prohibited because the blocked the view of the architecture of the library.
10. Lane drops in between other lanes going the same way: This is bad design. It confuses drivers. If lanes must be dropped in the middle, it would be better to use frontage roads or scissors ramps than dropping lanes in the middle of the road.
11. Inadequate signing for which lane to use for which destination: This causes many last-minute lane changes, endangering other drivers.
12. Setting speed limits by legislation, rather than by solid engineering: This causes unnecessary lawbreaking by competent drivers, and too many passing conflicts.
13. Setting a speed limit lower than the design speed of the road: This causes unnecessary lawbreaking by competent drivers, and also causes too many passing conflicts.
14. Driveways too close to intersections: Vehicles entering and exiting driveways near intersections cause unexpected conflicts, blocking lanes while waiting to turn, and activate the wrong detectors at traffic signals.
15. Inadequate sight distance: This is often due to a building or trees placed too close to the road.
16. Signs hidden behind trees, telephone poles, or other signs: This is usually caused by sticking too well to the guidelines for sign placement, instead of adjusting the placement to fit actual conditions.
17. Insufficiently posted speed limits: This causes drivers who turn onto highways from side roads to not know the speed limit for miles. The traffic system must always be made such that a stranger to the area can drive it correctly using only what he can see. Many school zones are badly posted in this manner.
18. Restricting trucks to the same lanes that traffic must use to exit and enter the freeway: This is a good way to cause more accidents, just to favor the speed demons over careful drivers. So is reserving a lane for passing, which also reduces the overall capacity of the road.
19. Having different speed limits for different kinds of vehicles on the same road is guaranteed to cause more accidents due to increased passing conflicts.
20. Placing traffic signs to close to intersections: Turning drivers need to see the road there, and miss the signs. Often the signs are also hidden from turning drivers by the vehicle roofs.
21. Causing second yellow trap by ending a permissive turn while an opposing right turn has a green arrow or flashing yellow arrow: The right turn should be stopped, and then restarted, or it should have its own merge lane.
22. Making intersections too small for trucks to be able to turn: This is a stupid design intended to favor pedestrians, at the expense of the trucks bringing the products to be sold to them.
23. Refusal to use one-way streets to improve traffic flow and facilitate signal progression: This wastes traffic capacity, and wastes energy with unnecessary stops.
24. Sending unsuspecting motorists from through highways onto side streets to make way for traffic leaving a concert or a sporting event: This is an unfair treatment of strangers to the area in an attempt to favor the people attending useless events that fill government coffers.
25. Not clearly posting a detour, not posting which road the detour is for on the signs, or choosing a detour route that trucks cannot negotiate the turns on: This saves the contractor a few dollars, but sends motorists wandering and wasting fuel. Truck unable to turn cause traffic jams, and also leave the marked truck routes to avoid the place they can't maneuver.
26. Unnecessary slowing high speed traffic by allowing schools to be built on major highways: This is stupidly putting government first, at the expense of everyone else. It also wastes energy.
27. Requiring through traffic to change lanes to stay on the through route: This causes drivers who don't notice the need to change lanes in time, or who can't make the change due to traffic, to waste fuel by driving out of their way.
28. Placing aesthetics above safety and function: This is one of the worst demands politicians make on engineers. Aesthetics are worthless, and often cause traffic accidents. One serious problem is the black signal head. It looks sharp to politicians, but in a power failure at night, it is totally invisible to drivers. They don't know to use the all-way-stop rule because they can't see that a signal is there.
29. Requiring highway traffic to stop for recreational trail users: This is the biggest waste of fuel resources for trivial reasons I can think of. Every stop uses more fuel than not stopping does.
30. Requiring or allowing trees to be planted too close to the road: Trees should be placed at least 20 feet away from the road to preserve sight distance and prevent pavement damage.
31. Any ambiguous traffic sign, signal, marking, or other traffic control device will cause drivers to become confused. Confusion leads to wasted fuel and auto accidents.
32. Left turn phases on low volume approaches: This is not intended to be efficient. Unless it is there to prevent yellow trap, it is there for political reasons. Such uses must be abolished.
33. Misplacing the word "only" (an adjective, not an adverb) on signs confuses people who know the rules of English. "Only" modifies the word following it, not the verb.
34. Allowing environmentalists to inject their religious beliefs (not proved facts) into traffic control usually cause others to waste fuel.
35. Allowing citizen pressure groups or layman politicians to override MUTCD specifications or the decisions of trained engineer: These misguided practices usually end up costing people more in fuel. The most efficient solutions are usually discarded in such a process.
36. Concentrating on stopping traffic, rather than moving it, is guaranteed to waste more fuel. But it is the typical wrong response of a layman given the job of controlling traffic.
37. Designing cities with additional diagonal streets often looks good on paper, but it is a nightmare to implement traffic controls for. The bottlenecks are usually multiphase traffic signals with six legs to control.
38. Expecting mass transit to handle more than 10 percent of the trips. The transit system usually does not go to the places the other 90 percent of the trips need to come from or go to. Except in the 15 largest cities in the US, mass transit can't afford to cover even 10 percent of the places.
39. Overuse of left-turn phases, instead of considering alternatives (one-way streets or indirect turns): The other alternatives are initially more expensive, but the fuel savings should pay for the extra paving in a few years. Left turn phases in all four directions also usually preclude any form of green light progression.
40. Using traffic calming devices to remove traffic from a politician's street is more political greed. If the politician doesn't like the traffic, he should move.
41. Parking meters and parking time limits abet government greed, with no real benefit. The shoppers the merchants hope to attract will shop elsewhere, where they are not threatened by time limits or pay parking. These greedy devices send the shoppers to the malls.
42. Speed bumps: Whoever invented this deserves a firing squad. Speed bumps damage vehicles, and they don't slow all traffic because many drivers find they are less obtrusive at higher speeds. They should be abolished.
43. Misunderstanding the red arrow on a traffic signal, or refusing to allow its use: Too many politicians associate an arrow with movement, rather than direction. Fortunately, the drivers do not. If Florida has used red arrows for years without trouble, then maybe some other states can learn from this, and allow red arrows. The MUTCD now requires them on new exclusively protected turn signals.
44. Toll roads reduce overall capacity. The only thing they are good for is fattening greedy government's coffers. They belong to the past.
45. Signs advertising government facilities, and ads allowed on the sides of government-owned buses, which are used in areas with billboard bans and large business sign bans, are unfair treatment of others wanting to advertise, and shows off the severity of government selfishness and greed.
46. Letting a layman traffic commission make traffic control decisions is like letting an untrained person design a building. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
47. Officials want a traffic hazard to remain in place so they can continue to collect fines from violators.
48. Preservationists demand that an old building in the way of a major project be preserved for posterity.
49. Any speed limit 20 mph or under that is not part of a school zone, playground zone, or alley is a violation of the MUTCD. But governments post them anyway.
50. Many want STOP signs put up to control speed. It doesn't work, and it's not an authorized use of STOP signs.
I may have posted this peeve of mine previously, but because I am encountering it more and more often lately, I think that it is worth posting again:
Imagine that you are driving on a rural road (one lane in each direction, with extremely narrow shoulders that are not wide enough to fully accommodate a car). In the opposite direction, there is a farm tractor approaching, and he is as far onto the shoulder as he can go, but because of the narrowness of the shoulder, about half of his bulk is in the approaching traffic lane.
Naturally, there tends to be some back-up of traffic behind him, as the farm tractor is going no more than 20 mph. And, naturally, the drivers of the backed-up cars are eager to pass the tractor.
Because passing the tractor requires pulling into the opposing lane, most drivers will wait until it is safe to pull into the opposing lane, but--unfortunately--there seem to be an increasing number of brain-dead drivers (mostly older women, it seems), who will suddenly veer into the opposing lane even if they are only a few car lengths from traffic approaching from the opposite direction--at ~50 mph.
All too often recently, I have had to dive for the narrow shoulder on my side of the road, in order to avoid a head-on collision with these dangerous drivers. Out of necessity, I have adopted a very defensive tactic by slowing down when I see a farm tractor coming toward me, simply because I know of the likelihood that some idiot will suddenly veer into my lane in order to pass that slow-moving tractor.
Has anyone else encountered this semi-suicidal behavior?
Let's get to road raging here. What are your biggest pet peeves when driving?
I drive a lot of miles, so I see a fair number of rude drivers, and they bug me. But by far it is the inattentive and indecisive drivers that make the top of my list.
For example:
I'm driving along the Interstate. There is a large gap in front of my car and a large gap behind my car. I come upon an on-ramp. There is one car coming down that ramp. This driver does not bother picking out a space to merge into; he or she doesn't even bother looking. I end up either having to speed up, slow down, or move over to avoid hitting this person, because he or she would otherwise be right beside my car at the merge point--in spite of the amount of space both in front and behind my car!
Why is it so hard for you to just move into the left lane? This may come as a shock to you, but it's what's done on Interstates all the time in many parts of the country when traffic flow is light to moderate. It's called courtesy.
Why is it so hard for you to just move into the left lane? This may come as a shock to you, but it's what's done on Interstates all the time in many parts of the country when traffic flow is light to moderate. It's called courtesy.
The term that is usually used is, "Complimentary Lane Change", and I execute these maneuvers all the time on the interstate highways.
I would much rather do whatever I can in order to avoid an accident than try to prove that I have the right of way, and that the drivers who are merging are interlopers into my lane. Somehow, my strategy must be effective, because I have not had a traffic accident of any kind for 43 years.
I still recall a sentence from the NJ Driver's Manual, circa mid-'60s "Right of way" is something that we never have exclusively, and are frequently called upon to yield to others.
(sort of related to driving) The pedestrian walking WITH (not against) traffic INTO the sun (I'm blind approaching him from behind) IN the street while there is a perfectly good sidewalk on both sides of the street. This same guy has a walkman on so he can't hear me approaching from behind. Often she is pushing a baby carriage. Darwin.
Do you live in Jamestown, NY by chance? I have never lived any place where so many people are so adverse to using sidewalks! I've seen parents walking with their kids in the streets, so you know who the kids learn it from. In the winter, the city plows the sidewalks along streets near the schools because only the handicapped kids and pre-kers are bussed. Kids still walk in the street, even when the snow in the street may be deeper than on the sidewalks!
If you miss your turn or exit, keep going until you can turn around. No need to endanger others by slamming on the brakes or swerving across several lanes of traffic to catch your exit or turn.
If you miss your turn or exit, keep going until you can turn around. No need to endanger others by slamming on the brakes or swerving across several lanes of traffic to catch your exit or turn.
...or backing up on the shoulder, and...inevitably...backing up into the exit lane, thus setting up a very real possibility of a collision.
For some reason that I have never quite been able to fathom, some people seem to think that they will enter a mysterious black hole from which they will never emerge if they have to exit at the next interchange.
The BIG PEEVES - these are dangers, not annoyances:
1. Cell phones. Not just texting, but talking too. The only two property damage accidents I was ever in were caused by the other driver not paying attention because she was on the phone (both were women). The cop confiscated one of the driver's phone because she kept answering it during the interview.
2. Tailgating. Nobody should be following closer than 2 seconds spacing on dry roads below 45 mph, or 3 to 4 seconds above 45 mph. Add one second to th3ese in rain, or double them for snow. For ice or fog, the spacing should be 5 times the original amounts.
3. A driver speeding up when being passed on a two lane road.
4. Drivers going full speed through fog, instead of slowing down to their sight distance.
5. Drivers ignoring the merge sign.
6. Bicycle riders not obeying the vehicle traffic laws.
All of the above but especially the bolded! If I can not see your headlights in my rear mirror your are to dam close fool back off
That whole "add on" aisle should be eliminated. Pin stripes, door edge protectors, key hole protectors, mud flaps, chrome (plastic) stuff/emblems is all geared for the "old man/immigrant customizer!"
Who died and left you the customizer Nazi??? You don't like it, don't put it on your vehicle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kanhawk
People driving slow on a 2 lane winding road. You come to a passing lane and they SPEED UP making it so you have to floor it just to get around them and if you don't, they go back to poking along after the passing lane has ended.
Related to this are the people who drive 5-10 miles under the speed limit on smooth, relatively straight state/county highways (55 mph here) in good weather but continue driving that same speed right through towns with well-posted speed limits of 35 mph so that the fools are now driving 45-50 mph in a 35 zone. I fail to understand this mentality.
One of my pet peeves is the numerous people around here who don't move into left turn lanes properly. Some wait too long to turn in, and so their vehicles aren't parallel to the traffic lanes, but slanted across the left turn lane and part of the thru traffic lane next to it. Others apparently don't want to get too close to on-coming traffic, so they're half in the left turn lane and half in the thru traffic lane! DOH!
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