Top things that other drivers do that annoy you

[SkiDork]

here;s one:

While merging onto a service road from the onramp (from an intersecting highway) in a line of cars, all wanting to do the same thing, which is move left so we can enter the new highway.

Car behind me decides they're gonna go around me and get ahead of me, as I'm still moving left. Then honks because I'm "in her way".

I gave her the finger... Whatever happened to waiting your turn in line?

 

[ski stef]

 

[bvibert]

I wish there were really signs like that!

 

[mattm59]

What a great way to make friends! What ever happened to diversity and tolerance? We all share this world for only a few moments in time. I don't see what the big rush is if you've planned ahead. Let's just lighten up and practice a bit of patience.

Screw tolerance...since 2008 I've been t-boned at a stop light, and rear ended by a commercial prepped F250, once again stopped at a light.Seems the chiropractor and lawyer are my best friends, but I'd rather just be the way I was, before the memory loss, neck and back pain, and headaches. My wife was broadsided by a idiot backing out of her driveway. I have NO effen tolerance for people who drive without awareness of and for others. A-hole girl up the street tries passing my wife on the left as my wife is making a left into OUR DRIVEWAY, for what, so she can get home 1 second quicker? Then HER mom threatens to call the police on me when I asked how an idiot like her got a license. Wish I had my old F650 with a plow sometimes; I'd just put these jerks into the ditch.
It's been said horses never hit telephone poles, perhaps more people show be in the saddle, not behind the wheel of a 3000 pound mindless mass of matter.

 

[mondeo]

What a great way to make friends! What ever happened to diversity and tolerance? We all share this world for only a few moments in time. I don't see what the big rush is if you've planned ahead. Let's just lighten up and practice a bit of patience.

Because you're slowing thousands of other people down.

Let's take a stop light for example. A stop light where driving like an old man, you get 7 cars through per green, if you drive like a bat out of hell you get 8 through. No big difference, right? One person has to wait for the next cycle.

But it's 4:30, start of rush hour. Even if only 8 cars arrive at the next cycle and every following cycle for the next hour and a half, if it takes a minute for the light to cycle, you've wasted an hour and a half of people's time just because you couldn't be bothered to hit the gas.

Yes, I have a specific light on my way home from work in mind. There are times it gets backed up for 20-30 cars, just because people drive stupidly slow.

The same principle applies to traffic jams. The person behind you can't go any faster until you accelerate. The person behind them can't speed up until they do. The first person in line with less than a second between themselves and the car in front of them is the person causing the traffic jam. HIT THE DAMN GAS.

I've always thought it would be interesting to make a traffic model where you could model the behavior of different types of drivers. My bet's on a highway with 2 lanes out of 4 blocked gets cleared a hell of a lot quicker when every car has an aggressive driver in it rather than a Camry driver.

Let me guess, you drive an Outback, Camry, or minivan?

 

[mondeo]

Why the hell is that car on the brakes?

 

[Geoff]

Screw tolerance...since 2008 I've been t-boned at a stop light, and rear ended by a commercial prepped F250, once again stopped at a light.Seems the chiropractor and lawyer are my best friends, but I'd rather just be the way I was, before the memory loss, neck and back pain, and headaches. My wife was broadsided by a idiot backing out of her driveway. I have NO effen tolerance for people who drive without awareness of and for others. A-hole girl up the street tries passing my wife on the left as my wife is making a left into OUR DRIVEWAY, for what, so she can get home 1 second quicker? Then HER mom threatens to call the police on me when I asked how an idiot like her got a license. Wish I had my old F650 with a plow sometimes; I'd just put these jerks into the ditch.
It's been said horses never hit telephone poles, perhaps more people show be in the saddle, not behind the wheel of a 3000 pound mindless mass of matter.

My boyhood best friend got rear-ended by a drunk ex-state rep at a traffic light where a 65 mph divided highway ends. He died of ALS about 10 years later. ALS is often triggered by a major trauma like that where all the years of pain management eventually have your immune system attacking your own nervous system.

I think I've already written this in this thread but the thing that pisses me off the most is looking in my rear view mirror of my Volkswagen and seeing nothing but the enormous grill of a full-size SUV or pickup truck. Invariably, I can see the cell phone glued to their ear. My braking distance is half that of a 6,000 pound mass of Detroit excess. In any kind of emergency situation, I'm dead. I drive a police-attracting orange car so I have to drive the speed limit. One car length of separation at 50 mph in an SUV or pickup should be a negligent operation ticket with an automatic 30 day license suspension.

 

[SkiingInABlueDream]

Why the hell is that car on the brakes?

trail braking into the turn.

 

[speden]

It's been said horses never hit telephone poles, perhaps more people show be in the saddle, not behind the wheel of a 3000 pound mindless mass of matter.

Just give it a little time. The car engineers are working on smarter cars with automatic collision avoidance features. It started with anti-lock brakes, where the car ignores the driver when they try to skid into an accident, but that's child's play compared to what is becoming possible. Now they're looking at stuff like using radar to actually take over the steering when someone is about to crash. They've already got adaptive cruise control that will stop if traffic stops. Probably before long the cars will be able to drive themselves. Considering how common it is for people to drive impaired these days, be it drunk, distracted, or just a bad driver, this stuff can't come soon enough. Seems like every other day I see a news story of a car or truck driving through a building. Computers don't get confused about which pedal is the gas and which pedal is the brake, so it might be better if they do the driving.

 

[mondeo]

trail braking into the turn.

They've got at least another 100 feet before they need to slow down. And that's heavy on the brakes (noticably pitched down at the nose.)

 

[bvibert]

Why the hell is that car on the brakes?

Because they're in the "IF YOU CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHY, THEN TAKE THIS LANE" lane???

 

[bvibert]

Just give it a little time. The car engineers are working on smarter cars with automatic collision avoidance features. It started with anti-lock brakes, where the car ignores the driver when they try to skid into an accident, but that's child's play compared to what is becoming possible. Now they're looking at stuff like using radar to actually take over the steering when someone is about to crash. They've already got adaptive cruise control that will stop if traffic stops. Probably before long the cars will be able to drive themselves. Considering how common it is for people to drive impaired these days, be it drunk, distracted, or just a bad driver, this stuff can't come soon enough. Seems like every other day I see a news story of a car or truck driving through a building. Computers don't get confused about which pedal is the gas and which pedal is the brake, so it might be better if they do the driving.

For the rest of the driving public that may be the case, however, I DO NOT want a computer driving my car for me!

I understand where you're coming from, but it's only a matter of time before shit like that becomes mandated in cars. It's a slippery slope that I don't want to go down.

 

[mondeo]

Just give it a little time. The car engineers are working on smarter cars with automatic collision avoidance features. It started with anti-lock brakes, where the car ignores the driver when they try to skid into an accident, but that's child's play compared to what is becoming possible. Now they're looking at stuff like using radar to actually take over the steering when someone is about to crash. They've already got adaptive cruise control that will stop if traffic stops. Probably before long the cars will be able to drive themselves. Considering how common it is for people to drive impaired these days, be it drunk, distracted, or just a bad driver, this stuff can't come soon enough. Seems like every other day I see a news story of a car or truck driving through a building. Computers don't get confused about which pedal is the gas and which pedal is the brake, so it might be better if they do the driving.

Until cars get fully automated, all these things just make people worse drivers. Adaptive cruise control is a terrible idea. All it means is people can completely stop paying attention to what speed they're going, so instead of maintaining speed and changing lanes to pass they just slow down. Which makes the next person just slow down.

People are actually fairly good drivers when they pay attention to what they're doing. The new stuff is simply another way to detach people from driving, which will only make them worse at it.

There are a couple interesting studies in traffic engineering that show that less direction actually makes traffic move more quickly. There was a case in an European city where a power outage during rush hour resulted in much less congestion due to the lack of traffic lights, and there have been a couple towns where they've removed almost all traffic signs and pavement markings and accidents have gone down. If your mind is already active, it's a lot easier to adapt to the different scenarios that present themselves while driving.

 

[SkiingInABlueDream]

They've got at least another 100 feet before they need to slow down. And that's heavy on the brakes (noticably pitched down at the nose.)

not if their entry speed was ~130.

 

[ctenidae]

They've got at least another 100 feet before they need to slow down. And that's heavy on the brakes (noticably pitched down at the nose.)

There's a twisty bit of road on my way in that I like, except when I'm behind slow people who don't know how to drive. I'm convinced that not knowing how to drive is why they do the things they do- it's not a driving style, it's fear.

Imagine going into a curve a little fast for your liking- if you know how to drive, you know the worst thing you can do is stab the brakes, because it makes your car go all wonky. But if you don't know how to drive, you stab your brakes because you think you're going too fast, and lo and behold, your car goes wonky, proving that you were, in fact, going too fast. Rather than think ahead and brake before the turn, or, even better, staying on it and powering through the turn, people go for the simplest equation (too fast =slow down, brakes = slow down, ergo too fast= brakes) and make their situation worse.

My wife gets onto me for getting frustrated with everyone else on the road. I don't get fustrated with everyone, though- I'm fully aware that 10% of people know how to drive, and probably 70% don't know how, but they all do it wrong the same way, so you can think ahead and account for them. It's the 30% who do it so completely wrong in a spectacular manner that makes no sense whatsoever that get me annoyed, mostly because they screw up my carefully thought out strategy for dealing with whatever numbskullery is occuring at the moment.

 

[wa-loaf]

My wife gets onto me for getting frustrated with everyone else on the road. I don't get fustrated with everyone, though- I'm fully aware that 10% of people know how to drive, and probably 70% don't know how, but they all do it wrong the same way, so you can think ahead and account for them. It's the 30% who do it so completely wrong in a spectacular manner that makes no sense whatsoever that get me annoyed, mostly because they screw up my carefully thought out strategy for dealing with whatever numbskullery is occuring at the moment.

I expect people to do the wrong/dumb thing on the road these days and tailor my driving to them. When some does something nice like waving me through or yielding at the stop sign, etc... it screws up the flow ...

 

[mondeo]

not if their entry speed was ~130.

It's a late '90s Legacy. It came with 137hp, 10+ years ago. I think it's a pretty safe bet it wasn't at 130mph coming in.

 

[mondeo]

There's a twisty bit of road on my way in that I like, except when I'm behind slow people who don't know how to drive. I'm convinced that not knowing how to drive is why they do the things they do- it's not a driving style, it's fear.

Imagine going into a curve a little fast for your liking- if you know how to drive, you know the worst thing you can do is stab the brakes, because it makes your car go all wonky. But if you don't know how to drive, you stab your brakes because you think you're going too fast, and lo and behold, your car goes wonky, proving that you were, in fact, going too fast. Rather than think ahead and brake before the turn, or, even better, staying on it and powering through the turn, people go for the simplest equation (too fast =slow down, brakes = slow down, ergo too fast= brakes) and make their situation worse.

My wife gets onto me for getting frustrated with everyone else on the road. I don't get fustrated with everyone, though- I'm fully aware that 10% of people know how to drive, and probably 70% don't know how, but they all do it wrong the same way, so you can think ahead and account for them. It's the 30% who do it so completely wrong in a spectacular manner that makes no sense whatsoever that get me annoyed, mostly because they screw up my carefully thought out strategy for dealing with whatever numbskullery is occuring at the moment.

You really gave 110% of your effort on that comment.

I braked while understeering hard once. Once.

I kinda want to get this T-shirt: http://enthusiastapparel.com/Neverlift

 

[SkiingInABlueDream]

Dont think this has been said yet - ppl who gridlock intersections in heavy traffic. The person has a green light but can't go all the way thru the intersection because there's traffic on the other side. They get into the middle of the intersection anyway and stop. The light turns and cross traffic is blocked.

what the heck...

2) Ppl who insist on hanging off the back end of trucks in rain & snow because they're afraid to pass through the spray in the wake.

3) Ppl who try to close the gap in front of them when you need to change lanes, even though they'd been leaving like 4 car lengths' gap before they realised you wanted to merge.

4) ppl who insist on merging into the less-than-2-car-lengths gap in front of you when there's 10 cars' gap behind you.

guess i had a bad commute this morning...

 

[ctenidae]

You really gave 110% of your effort on that comment.

I braked while understeering hard once. Once.

I kinda want to get this T-shirt: http://enthusiastapparel.com/Neverlift

Heh- I play the lottery, too...

Never Lift is good. I like the "Goes like Schnell" too.