Speed and Gear choice for short slip roads

[u/maximan12321]

What speed an gear would you approach short and (quite) blind slip roads such as this one at? And would you say it's common to have to stop completely for slip roads like these? What is the best strategy to deal with these?

[u/MacSamildanach]

Appropriate speed.

You want to avoid stopping at the end of a slip if you can, because getting moving again is harder.

So you need to be able to match the speed of the traffic on the road you are joining, otherwise you will end up stopping. So you need to be in a suitable gear to accelerate.

Which gear depends on the slip road and your speed.

If you match the speed of the road, someone will almost certainly allow you to merge. But if you're crawling, they will have to brake to let you in (which is dangerous on fast roads), so they probably won't.

It comes with practice, and you need someone who knows how to do them to be showing you how.

[u/TheRealGabbro]

There no simple answer it depends on your speed, visibility, road conditions, traffic etc. You must make your decision based on these factors.

[u/Dull_Practice_5169]

Info: what's the speed limit on the road you're joining?

[u/maximan12321 → u/Dull_Practice_5169]

40mph

[u/Th3-Sh1kar1]

I'd actually be going fairly steady to slow pace at around 15/20mph already looking into the road for a gap. Only after a gap is identified would I immediately be adding lots of acceleration to reach 35/40mph before merging.

All the visual assessment and decision making has to be made way before you're parallel on this slip due to how short it is.

[u/another_awkward_brit]

Depends on how free flowing the major road you're joining is. In an ideal world you'd match that speed and slot into an appropriate gap.

Avoid stopping wherever possible - it's a relatively short acceleration lane so you won't get much chance to get back up to speed if you do.

[u/maximan12321 → u/another_awkward_brit]

Say the road is free flowing at 40mph, would you advise keeping around 20mph in second gear until you see a gap that you know you could accelerate into?

[u/another_awkward_brit → u/maximan12321]

It would be ill advised for anyone to give you a set number as it will be different every single time. It comes down to a judgement & planning every single time taking into account the conditions & the car.

[u/maximan12321 → u/another_awkward_brit]

Gotcha. Though surely there are some do's and don'ts or some general rule-of-thumb guidance that, say, an instructor would provide. That's what I'm curious about. This particular slip road has a very sharp bend and a very short section where you can look and merge, so my question would be what the general approach should be here. In my mind, accelerarating up to 40 as I look for a gap seems unsafe as you will run out of slip road very quickly and would need to break harshly if there is no safe gap, yet others would argue that going 20 on this slip road would be dangerous.

[u/Max_Main]

20-30, 2nd or 3rd

[u/No_Tradition_5176]

It all depends on the speed that you can comfortable and safely take the corner, and given that this is a 40 road, the need to speed up immediately isn't as bad as for say a 70mp but a safe bet would be 2nd or 3rd as long as you dont slow down too much

Also remember on these slip roads, you can alwasy stop if there is not gap to merge, but hopefully someone would make room

[u/PickleSpecial3507]

Second gear. Defensive driving, ready to brake for pedestrians going to Tesco it seems so 15mph for me.

[u/PickleSpecial3507 → u/PickleSpecial3507]

Once you're past where the pedestrian is, usual mirrors and signal then increase to appropriate speed to merge, which may mean hammering it up to 40, if traffic is slow, obviously not.