I don’t mind just nudging my cruise control down a tad when this happens behind a car, but there’s something claustrophobic about driving behind a box truck for a long period of time.
i mean. as long as you are passing, and not speeding, it’s not “camping in the passing lane.”
just because a dbag comes up behind you wanting to go 20 over the limit and you are not passing “fast enough” does not mean you are camping either.
You are absolutely wrong in the American state of Georgia and can be ticketed for it.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany, you must not overtake anyone unless you are “driving with significantly higher speed”.
This is basically unenforced though.
but always still under the limit? interesting! so overtaking a 20 under person is fast time wise but someone going 5 under makes the effective limit lower?
There’s no limit on the German Autobahn!
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Don’t know what you’re talking about
is that a “69” on the train?
how can you see what’s inside the car?
i don’t, but that on the outside looks like a 69 anyway
That’s how we do it here ;) our train rides are really good
It’s the Dutch trainlines (NS or Nederlandse Spoorwegen) logo!
“Oh shit, I’m being passed by a truck! Better speed up to match their pace.”
Ahhh, I’ve been caught doing this a few times. I would misjudge the speed differential and it would take way too long to pass the other guy. Trucks usually have governors on them and cruise control is set to max… Cars would back up behind me and I would be thinking “come on, man, let off the gas a little and let me by!” I always felt bad about it because I know what a piss off it is being caught behind that bullshit.
If you’re barely able/willing to travel faster than the other truck, why pass in the first place? You’re both traveling nearly the same speed. Just ride behind the other guy. The only time you need to pass is if you want to cruise substantially faster than the person you’re passing.
They said they misjudged the speed of the other driver.
You have to notice at some point approaching them.
He didn’t notice, as he had misjudged the speed difference.
When I see this happening I try to leave enough space behind so the trucker feels like they can slow down safely, and most of them do.
The red truck is passing, at 1km/h speed difference you shouldn’t be waiting more than 30 seconds for it to clear. Patience.
Every one replying to me that it’s technically three truck lengths needs to calm down. If you hate driving this much then there’s better things to do with that energy. It’s terrifying that I’m sharing the highway with some of y’all.
Grow up, we don’t choose to drive, we have to and we don’t want to be on the road with you either.
You’re poo-pooing the impatience of the car drivers but ignoring the impatience of the truck driver.
Why the hell is the truck passing another truck to begin with? You’re talking a measly 1 km/hr difference! For a trip of 100 km, that measly 1 km/hr difference means the truck driver is passing another truck to save a measly 36 seconds. (And that’s the ideal case, assuming the speed difference is maintained the whole time.) And by doing so they create a massive traffic jam that causes dozens of drivers to be delayed by minutes.
There’s a reason many states ban trucks from passing other trucks. It’s an extremely selfish and asshole thing to do. One truck driver saves 30 seconds or so on their trip. In exchange, dozens of drivers lose minutes. The truck driver is stealing an hour of time from the rest of society to give himself 30 seconds. You should not be defending such selfish bastards.
The math changes a bit if you assume a longer trip, but the conclusion won’t. Inevitably the time the truck driver steals from others will be vastly more than the time they save. It’s dangerous asocial behavior.
You don’t know why one truck decided to pass another one. Could be a safety issue. There’s no way for you to know for sure. It’s OK though, you’ll still get to your destination within a minute of when you would have if they hadn’t chosen to overtake. And everything will be fine.
Don’t care
You’re grasping at straws. What safety issue would cause one truck to need to pass another? If you’re worried about something falling off the truck in front of you, the correct response is to slow down and increase your following distance, not to slowly pass the other truck while creating a massive traffic hazard.
If it’s a “safety issue,” it’s definitely not happening at a 1 MPH speed differential. C’mon, now.
Exactly. If I’m driving a truck and I’m worried the truck in front of me is about to explode or have a part fly off it, I’m not going to pass them at 1 mph. If I can pass faster, I’ll pass quickly. If I can’t, I’ll hit the brakes and put a huge amount of distance between us. In a safety emergency, you want to increase your separation as fast as possible. You do that by braking, not by slowly passing.
for a truck to pass another truck, it has to be in the left lane for at least 3 truck-lengths, which is roughly 65 meters. 1kph is 10m/36s, so 65m is 36s×6.5 = 3.9minutes
Patience.
Tell that to the truck driver. 1 km/hr faster equates to just 36 seconds saved on a 100 km trip. And to do that they cause a massive traffic jam that greatly increases the chance of accidents and delays dozens of people for several minutes each.
Why are you OK haughtily telling dozens of drivers “patience,” while ignoring the massive asocial asshole causing a huge disruption from an even greater level of impatience?
Because I have witnessed car accidents with fatalities. Yes, the trucker is an asshole. Have patience. Get home safe.
Think of where you are right now. You are not the passenger of a vehicle telling a driver to have patience. We’re specifically discussing the situation from an outside perspective. “Have patience” is useful advice for someone actively driving a car stuck behind passing trucks. It comes across as condescending when you bring it into a discussion about whether passing truck drivers are in the wrong or not.
People telling me to have patience pisses me off.
The rounding caused by the 2 digit speed labels hide the actual problem. Blue is actually going 80.45 km/h and red is going 80.55 km/h.
You forget the other vehicle is also moving and is really long, it takes almost 3 minutes for one to pass the other and a distance of over 2000m. And just bumper to bumper, that doesn’t include safe lane changing distances either.
If you’re talking two cars, than yes.
Yeah but the red truck isnt letting me burn up all my gas. Its also making me wear out my break pads because i need to stay exactly 6 feet behind it until it finally moves over. At least I get a free lunch of rocks that my cars windshield gets to eat as I sit behind it.
They give you a full 6 ft of breathing room there? Must be a really nice place to live.
Insufferable nerd shit. The truck driver can fuck off are pass when appropriate.
People getting so bent out of shape seeing two trucks next to each other that they can’t even type straight.
You just have an axe to grind against cars in general. You’re not objective enough to have a useful opinion here.
I own two cars that I like very much. They are not necessary for my opinion to be useful. Ad hominem is for babies. Are you a baby?
Your opinions clearly indicate you have axe to grind against private vehicle ownership. Fair enough. But that is clouding your opinions. Half your posts are from the “Fuck Cars” community. You’re looking for any thin, ridiculous, and rare excuse to justify the truck driver creating a massive road hazard endangering dozens of innocent people.
Nah, they are assholes. They’ll get the slow down over the next half mile once I’m in front. Absolute ADHD contrariness fighting for these guys shitty at their jobs age not giving a fuck.
Drive less.
More if you include lane changes. Then there’s the line of other cars that had to slow down as well.
The trucks are still much more likely to be doing something useful to society than the ecocidal narcissists they’re pissing off by slowing down the zoom-zooms.
If this picture fills you with rage, you aren’t mature enough to be in control of two tons of heavy machinery anyway.
You don’t need to defend asocial assholes steeling hours from society to save themselves seconds.
asocial assholes steeling…from society to save themselves seconds.
Like people using private cars as personal transportation do?
This is my new pet peave, I hope this becomes illegal one day. It backs traffic up like crazy.
It is in Germany. Here overtaking may not take longer than 45s, so a truck can’t do it unless the other one is driving 10 km/h below the speed limit.
If they get caught they are 1/8 of their way to a suspended license (requiring a 6 month wait and a psychological review and the normal exam to reacquire) .In a lot of countries it is illegal.
France:
- vehicles above 3.5 tons longer than 7m: 50 metres distance minimum outside towns if cruising at the same speed (Code de la route R412-12 II)
- it’s illegal to attempt overtaking if it would impede the flow of traffic and the relative speeds do not allow for overtaking within a sufficiently short time (Code de la route R414-4 II)
- a lot of busy roads have a sign forbidding overtaking for heavy vehicles, sometimes with specific times listed.
None of it is enforced so you should always expect to be cut off.
Also of note: whenever there are random checks of trucks by police they find around 50% in violation of important regulations like rest times and the administrative situation of a work vehicle. They willfully avoid checking too much because it would mean the means of transport for 85% of freight suddenly becomes way more expensive.
At least in Brazil, the speed limit is different for cars/motorbikes and for trucks/buses, often it’s a 3:2 ratio.
For example, a highway with a maximum speed of 130 km/h (very rare, max speed is often 120km/h) would have a maximum speed of 85 km/h for trucks and buses. This is often informed by the same vertical sign, e.g.:
“Veículos leves
120
Veículos pesados
80”(translation: "lightweight vehicles: 120km/h / heavy vehicles: 80km/h)
If a truck is traveling at 100km/h in a highway whose speed limit (for cars and motorbikes) is 120km/h, the truck is committing a traffic violation.
Unfortunately, this happens a lot, with trucks often tail-following (is this the correct English terminology? I don’t remember) and threatening to run over a smaller vehicle which is trying to follow the laws and is traveling within the speed limits. People think “speed limit” means “required speed”.
To answer the question you posed in your comment, the common term in English for a car following extremely close to another car is usually “tailgating”. This refers to the “tail gate” that is on a the beds of flat bed trucks. So if you are following very close, you are nearly touching the tailgate.
It makes sense from one perspective (larger vehicle more mass more momentum) but considering that the impact of a 30kph collision is not negligible, and moreover that it will indisputably cause traffic to bunch up, is it helping or hindering safety?
Well, we do have countless accidents involving trucks on a daily basis, and those accidents often do cause the traffic to bunch up. One of the highways I’m somewhat used to drive through, “Rodovia Fernão Dias” (MG-460), is very famous for accidents in this regard. The accidents frequently involve retreaded tires (“pneu remolde”) popping off the truck’s wheels, and the truck is often traveling way beyond 80km/h (if they were traveling below 80km/h, maybe the truck would be slightly more controllable when such a thing happened I guess)…
In practice, the speed limit does nothing (except in cases they’re caught by a speed camera, but people deliberately de-accelerate when getting close to a speed camera before speeding up again). If people were to respect the speed limits all the times, especially the truckers, maybe, just maybe, accidents would be less frequent. The ones hindering safety are often the truckers, however, I don’t really blame them; the transportation companies they’re working to often push surreal demands unto them (e.g. “you must take this cargo from Santos to Belo Horizonte in 12 hours”, a 670km trip that’d take a car 10h non-stop, depending on the conditions of Rodoanel and Fernão Dias); they often use stimulant drugs (“rebite”) to keep awake during insane days-long trips, and sometimes you can spot a truck zig-zagging and veering off to the roadside because the trucker fell asleep.
I’m of the side that says just be patient, but I believe that mandated speed governors contribute to this issue. In Ontario where I’d seen this a lot, that is 105km/h, but it seems that they aren’t calibrated well, or engine performance for loaded trucks going up hills means they can’t pass even if they had been partway through it on the downhill. In Nova Scotia, I’ve been passed by large flatbed trucks that have no issue going 125km/h past me going 110.
i got to witness this with two double-trailer log carriers once, they were jockeying for position at 90km/h while i was trying to get past. now this was my first time in the company tesla model 3 (this was in 2017) and i just wanted to get past so i waited for an opening and floored it. after i had cleared them i looked down at the speedometer and i was doing 170. it didn’t feel any different to doing 90. super weird experience considering i’d managed to make myself car sick a few minutes earlier when accelerating from 40 to 100 on the onramp.
People get car sick in EVs more because there’s no audible cue when the car is accelerating, though exposure can train their brains enough to prevent it.
170? I didn’t think those could go that fast. Was it a performance or “plaid” one?
no, it was the base model. i think they’re limited to 180km/h.
Oh, km/h! I’m in the US. I think in Miles Davises and feets.
you know i’m fine with whatever fetishes, i just don’t want them doing that stuff when i’m around.
This is what driving on the Autobahn is like. I wonder how much fuel/energy is wasted by the frequent breaking and subsequent acceleration.
At least they’re going faster…
