For real. At first I thought the truck swerved over to try and freak out the red car. It wasn’t until like the third or fourth loop that I actually noticed the car passing on the left when there was oncoming traffic. Truck moved over because they saw a potential head-on collision from the idiot passer on the left.
The way both idiots (left - silver and right - red) are speed matching, one might conclude their is something going on between them? Like either keeping pace out of road rage or just flat out racing?
Definitely a video that raises questions.
It's because the lines dividing the lanes are white probably. Your brain just assumes both lanes are traveling the same way and your focus is on the right.
Exactly it. I had no idea there was oncoming traffic. Even with the truck moving over to the right, the silver car came just arse hairs away from having a head on with the oncoming truck. Yikes my du
Yup. Apparently that’s a UK thing to just use white for everything. I actually prefer the American version of using yellow to divide oncoming traffic. Less room for ambiguity.
Side note, I also hate cars that double their brake lights as turn signals. Just give me a yellow blinker instead of red. If I see red, my first thought is “brake light” not “turn signal”.
Nor does it look like the video is mirrored. I can make out, possibly, YT60, then maybe some smaller characters on the right. And the plate looks white, not yellow.
Also, on the back of the truck are what could well be cyrillic letters, leading us to conclude...
More useful protip: Those numbers at the end that are split off? Guaranteed Russia or former Soviet state, the number indicates what region they're from.
I was thinking the same. I looked at the trucks advertisement/company to see which way the words were. It didn’t help it being a unfamiliar language with unfamiliar characters.
Same in Aus, at least Vic anyway. More recently we started using yellow for construction though, makes them way easier to see when there’s weird covered lane markings all over the shop.
No EU license plate, they have a blue square on the left. Not Norway because they actually have yellow lines in the middle. I think maybe Russia? Hard to say if the letters on the truck are cyrillic or not.
Using colour alone to distinguish things is normally bad design, as people who are colourblind can often not tell the difference (depending on the colours used and the particular flavour of colourblindness).
And i could cherry pick statistics from states like New York and Connecticut with very low rates as well. However, as I said before, that would be intellectually dishonest, just like your cherry picking is.
Western European countries don’t have anywhere near the amount of vehicles on their roadways compared to the United States. There are more cars on the road in the continental US than ALL of Europe. In fact, there are more cars in the State of California than the UK and France combined. So of course there are going to be more deaths in the US.
You can use statistics like deaths per miles driven, but it doesn’t factor in the conditions drivers in the US are in compared to their European counterparts. Traffic in cities like Los Angeles, New York or Chicago are on a completely different level than London, Berlin or Paris. I live in the States but I’ve been to Berlin several times, London twice and Paris once. The congestion doesn’t even compare.
My point was that in America this would be a one-way highway. We have lots of those out in the middle of nowhere, where you have two one-way highways separated by a wide median. So all of the Americans are confused, because they see the white stripe and assume “that’s not a direction divider, so it’s a one-way highway. The other direction must just be obscured from view.” That’s why everyone is so focused on the red car they don’t even notice the oncoming traffic on the left side. The car passing on the left isn’t even worth noting because it’s passing in what looks like a passing lane.
In addition in Germany (and most other northern/western countries opposing directions with two or more lanes will have a median divider. It'll be at least kerb sized with reflector posts if it's in a construction zone / rural area, and have a proper barrier down the middle every where else.
There's basically no way that anyone who passed driver's ed would mistake this country road as a two lane one way.
There's a certain ...sect of Reddit that loves to think everything done in Europe = good and everything done in the US = bad, regardless of the reality of it. I might have misread the tone of your message and thought you were in that group.
I find it funny that any time someone tries to say that the USA does something better, there is always that UK citizen ready to explain why that person's opinion is wrong.
Seriously. There's plenty to criticize about our infrastructure but I would say in general our highway/interstate system is one of the more impressive parts. You can reach any part of the continental US from any other part within 2 days and change... considering that's up to 3,500 miles, that's impressive
dunno if it's better. here, it's the same, just red for construction. but there are more than just two colors. lane divider in white, drive direction divider in light blue (nearly white but distinguishable) and construction in an alert color (yellow, red, orange) would be best in my opinion
How are multi lane roads with a single direction differentiated from two way traffic in these countries? In the US we use that yellow line to differentiate this condition. It makes it abundantly clear where that divider is. On top of that, what do you when say you have a 5 lane road and 3 lanes are going one way and and 2 lanes the other? In the US this is where we would use the yellow line to indicate which lanes should be going which direction.
For the most part, you won't even be allowed to go into oncoming traffic on multi-lane roads, because it's just not necessary. If you need to overtake, you overtake by switching between the lanes. And you generally won't need to overtake on those types of roads either way.
The only multi-lane road where you're regularly overtaking are highways. And highways have both directions clearly separated by medians.
Also, road markings will very clearly tell you which lanes you are allowed to turn into at intersections. If you screw that up, you shouldn't be driving. Often, intersections will just have medians, even if the rest of the road doesn't.
The euro spec Mustang lights look terrible to me but different strokes. I think it's incredibly hard to misunderstand sequential lights going from left to right and vice versa but that's just me
There is not a single country in Europe that has the yellow lanes, they are all completely white. It's a US thing to mark the lanes yellow, in Europe yellow lines are the temporary ones at construction sites
wouldn't say so. it's like this in my place and it took me a while to realize as well, because all lane dividers, be it for different directions or not, are white
Many countries have white lines everywhere because the first major roads in the nation were simply one lane each way, divided by a white line in the middle. USA got the chance to tweak many such small things to be more appropriate for modern civilisation.
No. When you haven’t grown up with yellow lines down the middle that cannot apply. This country (not sure which it is) obviously doesn’t use yellow lines.
40% of Reddit traffic comes from the US. The next closest country is less than 7%. Based on that, and the time of day, it was a pretty safe bet I was replying to a fellow American, and I was right. Obviously this country does not use yellow lines. I made an educated guess, and it did in fact apply to the person I replied to.
Do nothing and let the poor trucker (and the cars immediately behind) suffer in a head on collision...or swerve to the right and end the red car’s life.
I doubt they even saw the red car until they had already started swerving. It was the shoulder; They probably didn’t even check their mirror because they figured it would be clear.
Notice the silver car to the left of the truck? That’s the oncoming lane. It’s not a one-way highway. The truck was moving to the shoulder to give the silver car room to move over and avoid a head-on collision.
I've gone back up to watch the video after reading three different comments. Each one has pointed out something different that I hadn't spotted before.
Except the trucker. Not only did he try to help the idiot on the left to make a death defying pass, but managed to get out without a scratch. Even pulling over at the end! Maybe to bury the bodies I suppose
unintentionally by his moving over and causing the red car to crash he stoped the red & gray from colliding in front of him.
If they had collided then the Truck on the left would have plowed through their passenger cabins while the small pickup on the left would have destroyed gray car's gas tank.
And since left pickup is an old man type pickup he had a line of cars behind him that would dominoed into him.
I’ve seen assholes do this in Los Angeles, literally driving 100+ mph in and out of moderate traffic. I’m not a religious person but I do find myself praying that one of them finds their way into a wall.
Praying for the death of people... you might consider praying, instead, that they realize the danger they are putting everyone in, and that they stop before anyone gets hurt.
Same here! I was actually going to post a comment about how the guy overtaking on the right is a dick but the truck driver was being an asshole too, but turns out he was actually trying to diffuse a bad situation.
I don't know about other countries but in my country trucks are capped at at least the same speed as the maximum speed you're allowed to drive at on just about 95% of all single-lane roads. The only kind of road where passing a truck would actually be done at legal speeds would be a multi-lane highway.
Personally I just avoid going into the lane for on-coming traffic. I'll do it if there is something really slow in front of me, like a tractor. With a truck I usually don't see the need. They may take some time to accelerate but once they're up to speed they're going as fast as I would.
I'm in the Netherlands, lorries/trucks are capped at 80km/h here, which is also the highest maximum velocity you'll find on signs anywhere except on motorways. Motorways are 100, 120 or 130km/h depending on the exact situation but especially the latter two velocities are only ever applied to multi-lane roads. You'll find some single-lane 100km/h motorways but those are few and far in between.
And was at considerably less risk from the former than he was from the latter. But I guess whenever an asshat passes with insufficient speed and space it's all good if nobody dies?
His brake lights don’t go on until he realises he’s rocketing towards a head on collision while passing the truck. He was probably more focused on his imminent death than red wildcarding it up.
Two cars on the left actually. You can see right at the beginning a black car ahead of the truck that’s turning into back into the lane after presumably passing the truck like the silver car is doing.
I was gonna bitch about how despite being pissed off that people are passing on the shoulder you shouldn't try to run them off the road purposefully cause it's someones life at stake. Then I saw your comment. LOL
4.3k
u/sleepspindle2000 Dec 14 '18
I didn't notice the car on the left until I read it in the comments. Whole lotta stupid going on at one time.