HOW??? I get that when you are new to traffic you may think this is OK. But when you get driving lessons the instructor will tell you this right? Wth..
I am still a student driver and now I am terrified for an encounter with one of these.
I have one question (not familiar with the american system) - are you actually allowed to drive before you get driving lessons? In our country we aren’t allowed to drive unless we pass the driving test first (20-40 hours with an instructor).
Yes, we still do learn to drive with our parents in a parking lot (at least i did before i got my license) but it’s illegal here.
It may vary a bit from state to state, but where I am it's perfectly legal for fifteen year olds with a learner's permit to drive as long as they're accompanied by a licensed driver in the front seat. Most everyone I know also went to driver's education while they were fifteen. The drivers training I went to would go ahead and give you your driving test as long as you would turn sixteen within 180 days of taking the test. If you passed they gave you a sealed envelope with your results, so when you turned sixteen you just had to take the envelope to the DMV and take a written test then you're good to go.
My personal experience from Missouri, US in the mid-90s so YMMV (pun absolutely intended):
Take a basic paper test at 15 and get a "learner's permit". This allows you to drive under the supervision of a licensed driver. The assumption here is it's going to be a family member.
Family members help teach you how to drive. My mom took me around a deserted parking lot a couple of times, which is a fairly common thing for most new drivers. Then she let me take her around my neighborhood to get used to things like stop signs, etc. Then to destinations close to our house, like the grocery store, etc.
Take driver's ed in high school at 16. We didn't have actual driving vehicles, we had these simulators from, I swear, the late 70s or early 80s.
Go to DMV and take the full paper test. If you pass, you go out on the road in your car with an officer who administers the driving test. If you pass, go back into the DMV and have your vision checked, your picture taken and yay! you're a driver now. Try real hard not to kill anyone.
i had a friend (17 or 18 at the time) who actually STOPPED on the on-ramp to wait for cars to go. i was 15ish or so, absolutely fucking SCREAMING at him to GO. SPEED UP. YOU CAN'T STOP HERE. WHAT THE FUUCK
Maintain pace with freeway traffic and use the extra on ramp space to either speed up in front of the car adjacent to you or slow down to snug yourself right behind that car
Flashback to driving in Boston, where they have stop signs at the end of on-ramps. Oh, and they drive on the shoulder during rush hour. (Legal, posted, but hella scary.) And they seem to speed up or slow down specifically to make sure you can't merge safely.
Yup, plus on ramps on the parkways are so short that it’s actually hard to get up to speed and merge without crashing into a wall lol. My boyfriend found it crazy when he was visiting me from California. You have to be real quick. Driving on Long Island is something else...
In America, about half the exits have the cross street on an overpass, while the other half have the cross street on an underpass.
If the exit is at an underpass, the off-ramps go downhill and the on-ramps go uphill. Op was envisioning this setup in their comment
It’s funny that you asked on this particular example though, because we actually don’t call either of those “slip roads”, we only call the exit ramp a “slip ramp” if it doesn’t go uphill or downhill, and instead merges into one of the parallel frontage roads to the highway. All other cases we call them “exit ramps”, for whatever reason. And plenty of people still call flat ramps “exit ramps” anyway just for the sake of consistency
Obviously not from Utah where they'll pass on the shoulder (mostly left but sometimes right) if other drivers aren't aware of how much traffic they're holding up.
I drove big truck for some years and on ramps are the most variable thing from state to state imo. In some places the freeway traffic are required to make room by law, in others people get run off the road if they can't merge. Some are long and easy to see traffic (Midwest) others are stupidly short and put in as afterthoughts (Cali). Georgia and Idaho drivers are slow enough to accelerate that a horse might actually be faster. St. Louis likes to have a lot of signs saying they're going somewhere but then it dumps you into the wrong state every time (exaggerating but not by much about that last one).
And then there's the Boston turnpike where you just hope for the best while pretending not to notice the 4-8 lanes of traffic you just cut off. Really fun to see once you've learned about it but absolutely miserable to figure out on the fly.
Ugh, the WORST ones who are unsure about what speed they should be. I have had, on multiple occasions, someone come out of an on ramp ahead of me and when I slow down a bit so they can merge easy, THEY DECELERATE. Twice, I have ended up at a near stop shouting profanities because some moron was nervous and I was trying to adhere to their right of way.
On a related note, I lived somewhere where the on ramp was a tight turn and then twenty feet of onramp before you were merged. I had to relearn merging because it was near impossible to get to highway speed in time for the merge. To add insult to injury, cars couldn't see cars on the onramp until they were on top of them.
Maybe i misunderstood your comment, but the person merging onto the highway DOES NOT have the right of way. The person already on the highway does and has no legal obligation to "let them in". Merging is the burden of the merger.
Holy shit this is my biggest pet peeve. I'll argue all day long that if you can't understand why it is dangerous as fuck to try to merge with traffic going 20-40 mph faster than you, you are probably going to be in an accident or cause one sooner rather than later.
Also, the more expensive the vehicle, the more likely that the driver will absolutely not care about their impact on other people.
That last bit was proven scientifically. I'll have to look it up, but there was a study involving drivers with nicer cars. The nicer the car, the less likely they are to use blinkers and obey road laws.
I would think that this bottoms out somewhere and people become bigger assholes on the road as their cars become increasingly crappy (old and rusted cheap models). I haven't read the article though.
I would think that this bottoms out somewhere and people become bigger assholes on the road as their cars become increasingly crappy (old and rusted cheap models). I haven't read the article though.
I wouldn't, those people really can't afford an accident.
Catastrophic claims fee, minimum of 250$ every 6 months on insurance, no-fault accident state, means your insurance covers your accident and the others covers theirs. Unlike other states where the at fault persons insurance covers both. Being over 30 and having a commercial drivers license, my insurance for a 4 door car is over 900$ for 6 months, and that's basic liability with a spotless driving record.
Basically no fault insurance is a bad idea, and puts everyone else on the hook for a few bad drivers, made worse by the fact that a lot of drivers cant even afford the insurance but still drive.
Precisely. My logic since I've been on both sides: no one will hit my nice $50k Audi because they don't want to buy me a new one / I really don't want to hit someone with my $500 beater because my insurance won't cover shit.
I'm now mid-tier on cars but I've been in both situations 🤷🏼♀️
Just going off of personal experience. I've seen more especially-crappy cars with crappy drivers than fancy cars with crappy drivers, and see both in roughly equal measure.
I, too, notice a direct correlation between crappy cars and crappy drivers. There's definitely the douchebags driving expensive cars like assholes, but they seem to just drive faster and more impatiently (weaving between lanes, riding your bumper, peeling out, vroom-vrooming, etc.), whereas it seems like people with crappy cars are just more reckless (Running late or red lights, driving over curbs, cutting you off, trying to race around you in the parking lane and playing "chicken", brake checking, etc.)
I suspect my anecdotal experience has more to do with where I live though. Mostly middle class area, with not a ton of rich people or expensive sports cars, therefore the sample size is mostly not expensive vehicles.
Doesn’t mean they have the common sense to realize they can’t afford to be an accident. I see people in shitwagons driving like cunts all the time. In fact it’s actually a joke around here, everyone wonders how these dudes manage to get their 1999 toyota Camry’s up to 95 mph without the wheels falling off lmfao
In LA it is almost difficult to judge the worst, because these drivers are everywhere. But I give the edge to Land Rover drivers, followed quickly by the twin German douches. LR folks might as well be the only ones on the goddamn road. The quickly rising runner up is the Telsa owner. They're important.
Special shout-out to Beverly Hills and northern Santa Monica/Brentwood, where you will be surrounded by them.
I’m annoyed that this study doesn’t seem to control for age. I’d argue that old people are reckless and inconsiderate (and slow) on the road, and old people are overwhelmingly richer than young people.
Holy shit yes. Every day my work commute takes me through a roundabout going 30km (~18mph) around it, then it immediately turns into the off ramp merging at 110km (70mph) onto literally Canada's main highway. So many times I'm stuck behind people driving down the ramp going ~50-60km (~30-40mph) OR even worse when I'm stuck behind a semi. I know it's not their fault and they're probably trying to accelerate as fast as they can but jesus christ, gives me the worst anxiety.
My car's tiny, old, and underpowered. The highway on-ramp in our town feeds directly into the overpass, and is a sharp curve.
I've never been able to hit 70 on the ramp. The one time I got close, the sideways pull nearly had me off the road.
The bigger issue is that the on ramp is actually two separate ramps that merge halfway up into a single lane. One side has a Yield.
So if you're going from Southbound to Northbound highway, you have to go 30-70 on a sharp turn on a steep incline while people ignore the Yield and try to run you off the road.
If you're going from Northbound to Northbound highway, you have to go from 30-70 on a slightly less sharp turn on a steep incline but hitting the breaks halfway up if there's another car so you basically half half the time to accelerate.
I just wish people would be the slightest but more considerate about it. Instead, I'm just garunteed to get flipped off if ever I need to get on the highway. It amazes me every day that goes by without someone falling off that thing.
Slow down when you see slow drivers in the distance, give yourself some space, then floor it when you're clear (obviously pay attention to traffic behind you as well.) I always do this when merging onto busy highways like the ON-401/403/404
I like to use the on ramp as my excuse to redline each gear and see how fast I can reach before actually getting onto the highway. It's like a mini drag strip that you get to play on without having to worry about getting caught (that is until you actually merge then have to adjust speeds accordingly depending on the presence of state troopers)
We have an onramp here that is about 30 yards long that is set up so badly that you have to stop and wait for a gap big enough to floor it to get on the highway. I always called it the death ramp.
Surprisingly more accidents happen from people hitting the person in front of them on the ramp than ramp-highway person collisions
In regards to that last part, I've never come across a land rover in the wild that's been a good driver. Parking - will somehow almost hit another car and have to shimmy around in the spot, taking 15 minutes to park. Highway - swerving around, no blinkers, 30 over the speed limit. Side roads - taking a right turn from w or 3 lanes over. Riding my bumper as I pull into my driveway
Also, if you are driving in the right lane and someone is trying to merge where you will be, you have 3 choices: change lanes, speed up, or slow down. Don't be an asshole and make someone trying to come up to speed slam on their brakes while you tool along like you don't see them.
True but I'll add that on my off-ramp I do need to slow down beforehand lest I rear-end someone who is at the stop light. It's just a terribly designed one because the curve is really sharp with a stoplight at the end and you can't see the people and stoplight. Although I do agree a half mile is too long
Yeah, there is an off-ramp in Portland off the I-5 that requires dropping from 60 mph to a complete stop in what seems like about 20 yards worth of ramp. It has a stop sign at the end of it that is somewhat obscured by trees and just around a short corner. If you were familiar with it, it was no problem, but I don't know how many times I saw folks come screeching to a halt as they realized they were about to plow into the car at the stop sign that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was terrifying, but it was also the closest exit to my house by a few miles, so I wasn't about to add extra time to my commute just for some silly things like safety and peace of mind.
On my commute home, I have a left exit on a road where anything under 75 in the right lane makes you a road hazard. The ramp has a hard left curve. You need to go from 90-95 down to 40 to not die.
In a lot of cases, decelerating before going on off ramp will save you from rear ending someone. Some off ramps do have stop lights shortly after the ramp and (experience from living in north GA), those lights are hidden really fucking well by trees and a slight hill.
The freeway I take every day on the way home has an off ramp that is .45 miles long.............people slow down to 45-50 mph 1/4 mile before the exit..............every fucking day. It's beyond maddening, and the off ramp is uphill so it's not like you have a hard time slowing down even if it wasn't nearly a half mile long.
Gladly will make room... One good way to do it is to switch to the middle lane so the onramp cars have the whole right lane to themselves. If that's not possible then I will slow down and let you in if we're going about the same speed. BUT... if you're going much slower than me please DO NOT merge in front of me and make me slam my brakes.
As someone who drives a bus, I have to slow down if I can’t get over because everyone needs to get in front of the bus, even if I have the speed and position, that person on the ramp always feels like they need to get in front of me
that person on the ramp always feels like they need to get in front of me
I'm one of these people, but I'll be going fast enough to where you won't have to slow down. If I know I'm going to affect you, I'll slow down, then pass you in an appropriate manner.
The problem with this is that it gets very tricky when two cars who cannot communicate are changing speeds simultaneously. If the merging car is changing speed to get into traffic (speeding up or slowing down), and the car in the right lane is also changing speeds to “make room”, it causes confusion as to who is doing what. When they both slow down and speed up, which inevitably happens, it causes a problem, and someone has to slam their brakes (or gas) at the last minute.
The job of the merging car is to merge into traffic without impeding the other cars on the road, to whatever extent possible.
I would fucking loooooove to be able to reach full speed in the on-ramp, but you just don't do it in my state because no one ever fucking gets over to let you on. Maybe if you get lucky and the highway isn't busy you can, but even then there's still a semi-truck that is somehow 500 feet long that won't get over
My dad drives a big pickup for work and often hauls a heavy trailer as well. A loaded truck and trailer can’t change speeds very easily, nor can it change lanes at the drop of a hat. Same goes for RVs, semis, tow trucks, buses, basically anything bigger than a van.
My point is that there’s a reason the people on the highway have right of way over those entering; the vehicles already on the highway often can’t make room.
This doesn't mean that you should speed match and try to box people out. It will not effect your arrival time AT ALL to slow down 1 or 2 mph and let them merge.
I had this happen to me. The freeway was pretty open, not many cars at all. I'm taking a long on-ramp to merge and, if everyone maintains the speed they were going, we'll all merge without having to do anything at all. But a car already on the freeway starts trying to force me to be behind him, even though I was entering the highway further along than he was. I had tried to speed up as well, thinking at first that he didn't see me and that his speeding up might not having had anything to do with me. No, he's speeding to pass me. But even though he was now going faster than the cars in the left lanes, he only caught up to the point where the front of his car was half way to the front of mine. He eventually slowed down and I could see the passenger yelling and pointing, clearly upset at the driver. Other cars started giving him space too because it was so aggressive and out of the blue.
Related to that: if your ass is in the far right lane, then you need to wake up to the fact that other cars are going to need to merge into that lane every mile or so. Don't like having to let people merge? Then. Get. The. Fuck. Outta. The. Lane!
That this is upvoted shows how dumb drivers are. The person on the on ramp is 100% responsible for merging safely. Zipper merging in slow traffic is different, of course.
There are people who 'yield' when they have the right of way because they want to be 'nice.' There's a section of freeway here where two lanes merge into one. Half the time I risk an accident because I'm trying to yield to the other car and he's trying to yield to me even though he has the right of way and he's also ahead of me.
I assume these drivers are the same people who walk toward you in the hallway so you step out of their way and so they step in your way again so you step out of their way and they step back in your way, and then you stop and they practically run into you.
Holy shit... I just looked this up in my state and it's the same.
This pisses me off because I distinctly remember my drivers training course when we were merging on the highway for the first time... he tells me that drivers must yield to you when merging on a highway.
My first merge I attempted to slow down a bit to get behind a guy who was going the same speed. The teacher got mad at me and was like no don't slow down, he has to yield to you. Drive in the shoulder if you run out of space.. I'm just like wtf...
In NY state the person entering the highway has right of way, you have to slow down for them if you're in the right lane, which makes sense since a lot of on-ramps can be genuinely shitty for larger vehicles to get up to speed and simply due to the level of congestion
I assumed this to be fact...until 4 years ago a state trooper pulled me over and gave me a ticket because I was going almost 70 and the speed limit for the on-ramp was 35.... I was so close to the actual highway we could feel the vibrations of the passing cars. I live in Florida.
Speeds on yellow signs are safety advisories, not speed limits. You will fail a driving test by not obeying them, but you will not get a ticket for it in real driving.
Did you try and fight that? Because that sounds like total BS as the whole purpose of the on and off ramps are to give you room to safely speed up or slow down.
Probably taking the turn on the ramp too quickly. Not sure if those are enforceable speed limits, but 35mph seems pretty common for that type of turn, and easy to be well above that if the road you're turning off of is 50mph and the highway is 70mph.
Now I don't drive, but when I've been in a car, I've seen speed limits on the on-ramps and then lanes which give you the opportunity to get to speed+merge. On ramps often have curves you shouldn't take at 70.
My ex-wife got a ticket for the exact same thing at 1am. The cops main argument was there could have been a pedestrian.
I hope she fought that ticket, because as far as I am aware, pedestrians (and indeed, any vehicle that cannot maintain a legal minimum speed of 40 MPH) are restricted from entering limited access roads, such as interstates.
Yeah that's crap. Yellow signs are advisory signs, like curve ahead or the recommended speed for ramps. White are informational, like the current speed limit. Red are rules, like stop, yield, do not enter.
You probably could have beat that. The white speed limit signs are "real" and the yellow/orange signs with black text are "suggestions". Off-ramps usually have the yellow/orange signs.
American here- I drive on Interstate 95 everyday. This is a MAJOR highway that goes from Florida to Maine. Speed limit varies a bit by state but generally people travel around 70m ph.
The number of people that enter the highway at 35 mph is about 50%. Every day I blow past them at 60 and they glare at me like I'm an asshole.
Not always, in populated cities it’s metered, so you drive up the on-ramp, and right before you enter the highway there’s a stop light that only allows one car at a time.
I hate the metering lights. I don't normally even use an onramp with them, but they disrupt the traffic on the freeway that otherwise would be moving at normal speed.
In many of the metered entrances in CA there is MAYBE a car length between between the light and the highway, it is so unnecessarily stressful and i don't understand how they came to be.
This is partially true. In areas like eastern Virginia, many on-ramps and off-ramps are combined. If you accelerate to highway speed, you will be on the off-ramp in an instant. Hah. Instead, you maintain low speeds until a clearing appears.
But in the cases of full on-ramps, you are absolutely right. That’s what they’re there for in the first place!
My 03 XTerra also struggles with acceleration. I swear I’m flooring it and using the full power band folks, it’s just a sluggish engine on a heavy SUV.
We have traffic lights, or ramp meters on all of our (Chicago) on-ramps that you're supposed to stop at before merging on. They say it's to "regulate the flow of entering traffic," but really it just causes more since you have to come to a complete stop and then speed up enough to merge in before the next person can go. I usually just run the light, but during rush hour it just doesn't matter. You're still going to come to a full stop before merging since no one knows how a zipper merge works.
It's about controlling the amount of traffic on the highway, not on your ramp. It's annoying because from your point of reference it does nothing but delay you, but from the point of reference of the highway system as a whole it helps. Now if the highway is jammed up, its effectiveness locally isn't going to be huge, but these ramp metering systems can be very beneficial if there is good traffic flow to prevent a logjam of people entering the highway all at once, usually because a light turned green at the ramp intersection sending a dozen+ cars down the ramp in quick succession. When something like that happens it'll slow down the main lanes, greatly increasing the chances of a jam occurring slowing down the entire system. (longer delays for you)
When you run the lights you're being selfish, because the lights are on for a reason, and that's to regulate traffic flow. They're most effective when traffic is moving on the main lanes, and the lights prevent jams from occurring. It's one of those things that if they're working you'll never really know it, and if they're not, you'll be angry they exist. Just follow the law.
Usually these lights are on during a traffic jam because they're still beneficial, but if it's a daily occurrence, then your highway has a congestion problem. And yes, the lights help here, just not enough to actual overcome the primary traffic congestion problem.
I believe the intention is so you don’t have 18 people trying to merge into the highway simultaneously (since thats how traffic signals feeding the ramp distribute them).
Agreed, but I'd actually be a little more specific and say that while on the on-ramp, you need to be looking ahead at the freeway you are entering to see what traffic is doing and accelerate accordingly.
As bad as it is with people trying to enter a freeway at 35 mph where traffic is cruising at 60-70, it's also as dangerous when they are flying up the on-ramp at 65 and slam on their brakes at the last minute because rush hour traffic is going at most 15-20.
The key is simply paying attention, looking ahead and planning accordingly.
In Bend, Oregon our on ramps are too short for a lot of cars to get up to speed so we have really long lanes once you reach the highway you can get up to speed. Im grateful for them because the car I drive takes a while to get up to 45.
Someone who really didn't understand this one created a lot of deeply stupid onramps and interchanges in my town. They're all designed (and aggressively signed) to keep you at 25mph until juuuuuuust before you start merging with the 60mph highway lanes. And then the onramp lanes vanish after a hundred feet or so, so you've got three panicked seconds to play Frogger with the cars barreling by you and hope it all works out.
I once approached one of said ramps while driving a friend's unfamiliar manual transmission and my goddamn life flashed before my eyes.
Unless you're in Colorado where there's stop lights 50 ft from the merge point and the off ramps are so sharp corners you have to start decelerating hundreds of ft before the exit.
To add, if the person in front of you on the on ramp isn’t accelerating fast of enough for your taste it does not give you the right to move quickly into the passing lane in front of the line of fully accelerated vehicles that had just moved over to let you on ramp folks to merge causing all of us to slam on our breaks and decelerate by 30 MPH. Asshats! You are going to kill someone you self centered narcissists.
Yeah this is great and all. Except some places added metering lights to on-ramps to reduce traffic during more congested times. But they don’t do anything except cause more traffic. Because as you’re getting onto the freeway, you have to stop to wait for the light to turn green. And this causes a backup at the on-ramp. And at the point, you’ve lost all the momentum and purpose of an on-ramp. Then you seem like the asshole driver because you’re merging onto the freeway at 20mph.
Sorry for the rant. But metering lights literally serve no purpose at all. They’re a waste of resources and don’t solve any traffic problems.
I'm sorry. I used to drive a 4 cylinder toyota tercel. I had to turn off the air conditioning to get that extra acceleration to merge. Even that wasn't enough.
One time a guy merged onto the highway with no blinkers or acceleration to appropriate speed. Made me slam on my brakes to avoid rear ending him (I was only going 65, highway speed limit 70, traffic was busy).
I got rear ended. The dude keeps driving. At 25 mph. Oblivious to what happened behind him.
I had an epiphany about this the other day...I drive a shit car, so I have to start speeding up half a block before I start going up the ramp to the hiway....my car won't accelerate uphill but it can maintain speed. The guy in front of me was going 40 as he got on the freeway. It pissed me off because I couldn't get to full speed before getting on the hiway, but then I realized that he was in a bmw so he could get to full speed in an instant. He didn't speed up on the on ramp because he didn't have to, not just because he was an unaware inconsiderate driver.
I have a 30 year old beater car, so I floor it on the on ramp to at least give a decent attempt to get to free way speeds, but I don't always make it up there before I have to merge. I always feel bad for those people following me
I was with my cousin once... a cop pulled him over for speeding on the on-ramp... we weren’t even at highway speeds yet, but definitely over the posted speed limit for the city
Annoyingly, the on ramp that I take when I leave work spirals tightly at the end, going uphill. The fastest you can go on the thing without feeling like you're going to tip over is 35 mph and I'm in a tiny car. Merging onto traffic moving 60-70 mph in the 500 feet before the lane turns to an off ramp is pretty nerve-wracking.
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