Your bad driving encounters
- Thread starter Stu999
- Start date
It is essentially similar to brake checking the vehicle behind and that is actually illegal under UK law. The difference of course being that brake checkers know you are there, but the premise is the same. You should be aware of your surroundings and drive accordingly and within reasonable consideration of other road users. There has always been this myth that if you drive into the back of the vehicle in front, it is ALWAYS your fault. The truth is never that black and white under the law.
In your dad's and in my case, the insurers/courts deemed that the person in front panicked and broke abrubtly and dangerously for no valid reason. The person behind under UK law, should not be reasonably expecting that to happen. If we all drove around expecting someone to emergency brake for no reason, we would all be driving with 5 second gaps between cars even in 30 zones in perfect conditions.
Last edited:
Took the outside of 2 lanes through a light controlled junction as most traffic was indicating to turn off in the left hand lane, van at the start of the queue was continuing my direction. After the junction the road turns into a dual carriageway but the speed limit change from 40 to NSL is delayed around 200 yards for some random reason. I'd got a good bit ahead (got going a lot quicker than the other traffic when the lights at the junction changed), doing a reasonable speed for a 40, and just as I was checking in preparedness to indicate and move back over I notice the van is closing down the gap - comes right alongside me then slowly starts to undertake me - I ease off thinking I'm not playing silly games, ready to tuck back in behind him expecting him to take off once we hit the NSL change - by the time we get to the NSL change he is half his vehicle length ahead of me. Onto the dual carriageway proper and he just sits there doing maybe 55MPH - so I put my foot down and left him way behind...
I have no idea what goes through the heads of these people... utter turnips.
I have no idea what goes through the heads of these people... utter turnips.
Last edited:
There is a two lane roundabout that acts as the junction for two different 50mph carriageways. When heading southbound the left lane on the roundabout is for continuing southbound only and the right lane is only for going westbound. The lanes are clearly marked with arrows for a reasonable distance and of course there are roadsigns. I am always heading southbound at this point, as is most other traffic, so the left lane sometimes gets a bit of a queue.
Yet almost without fail you get the impatient ******** who decide that queueing is not something they should do. So they get into the right lane hoping to jump the traffic, then cut accross the clearly solid white lane markings to get into the left lane. So almost 100% of the time when you are on this roundabout in the left lane, the car on the right is a queue jumper trying to cut you up. So I adjust my speed to I stick right beside the obvious queue jumpers all the way round the roundabout to block them getting into the left lane. If they speed up or slow down so do I, and even a Focus/Fiesta ST/RS3/RS4/M2/M3/M4 are not going to get ahead of an I-Pace EV in such a short distance (yes some have tried).
You can sense their rage when they realise they have no room to get in the correct lane and have to go on around.
It's the simple pelasures
Yet almost without fail you get the impatient ******** who decide that queueing is not something they should do. So they get into the right lane hoping to jump the traffic, then cut accross the clearly solid white lane markings to get into the left lane. So almost 100% of the time when you are on this roundabout in the left lane, the car on the right is a queue jumper trying to cut you up. So I adjust my speed to I stick right beside the obvious queue jumpers all the way round the roundabout to block them getting into the left lane. If they speed up or slow down so do I, and even a Focus/Fiesta ST/RS3/RS4/M2/M3/M4 are not going to get ahead of an I-Pace EV in such a short distance (yes some have tried).
You can sense their rage when they realise they have no room to get in the correct lane and have to go on around.
It's the simple pelasures
Soldato
wow, you road warriorThere is a two lane roundabout that acts as the junction for two different 50mph carriageways. When heading southbound the left lane on the roundabout is for continuing southbound only and the right lane is only for going westbound. The lanes are clearly marked with arrows for a reasonable distance and of course there are roadsigns. I am always heading southbound at this point, as is most other traffic, so the left lane sometimes gets a bit of a queue.
Yet almost without fail you get the impatient ******** who decide that queueing is not something they should do. So they get into the right lane hoping to jump the traffic, then cut accross the clearly solid white lane markings to get into the left lane. So almost 100% of the time when you are on this roundabout in the left lane, the car on the right is a queue jumper trying to cut you up. So I adjust my speed to I stick right beside the obvious queue jumpers all the way round the roundabout to block them getting into the left lane. If they speed up or slow down so do I, and even a Focus/Fiesta ST/RS3/RS4/M2/M3/M4 are not going to get ahead of an I-Pace EV in such a short distance (yes some have tried).
You can sense their rage when they realise they have no room to get in the correct lane and have to go on around.
It's the simple pelasures
Soldato
The whole point of an "emergency" stop is that it is unexpected. If you were able to predict it in advance then you could slow down gently... While in your case you were lucky that the driver was obviously stupid enough to incriminate herself, at the time of the incident you had no way of knowing whether her emergency stop was down to an actual emergency or not - it's entirely possible that something could have happened in front of her that you were unable to see.
Regardless of the outcome of the insurance claim, you were clearly driving too close to be able to stop in time (someone has already posted that 2 car lengths is far too close, the recommended 2 second gap at 30mph is ~27m). Whether you choose to accept this and improve your driving, or are so arrogant that you believe you know better is up to you. For the sake of the rest of us on the road, I hope it's the former.
As far as my own poor driving experiences go, I live in the Midlands, I don't think the forum server (or in fact the entire internet) has enough storage to contain it all.
General trends I've noticed recently include terrible lane discipline on multilane roads (the last few long journeys I've been on there have been more cars in the wrong lane than the right one!), people sticking an indicator on and assuming that gives them right of way to manoeuvre regardless of vehicles around them (e.g. right indicator on, change lane in front of you, despite a 20mph speed difference and 5m distance), and lack of indication when turning into a junction you're waiting to emerge from, leaving you sitting there waiting for them to pass like a muppet.
Last edited:
Man of Honour
My favourite was is people just playing lucky dip with their indicators at roundabouts. Want to take the 3 o'clock exit coming from 6 o'clock, just indicate left as soon as you enter because that's the way you'll be turning at some point, maybe, sort of.
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Mar 2013
- Posts
- 9,315
You must have good drivers near you if they're even indicating to come off. I think near me there's a load of stevie wonder wannabees.
Man of Honour
I prefer the ones that just don't bother to be honest, at least then you know you give them a wide berth
Caporegime
As a trucker they always never indicate but when they see you coming out the junction they then miraculously remember to indicate just as you pull out then give you the flying bird as if it is your fault because you have "held" them up.
Last edited:
Where would I start?
Being a truck driver, I see all sorts day in, day out the height of the cab gives me a sometimes surprising perspective of what’s going on in cars, putting it another way, I frequently see people of both sexes pleasuring themselves whilst driving!
I could (perhaps should) write a book!
As a young lad i used to go out as a second man in a truck on saturdays for the extra overtime. I was shocked at a junction looking down to the left seeing a hot woman in her 30s with her skirt hitch up and she was "administrating" to herself. the driver said its normal and you see everything once you have been driving a few years. he says passengers giving the driver a blowjob was the most common sighting.
He probably did. One of our drivers had this happen a few months back pulling out of a tight junction that the truck turning in stopped to let him pull out. Another car decided they couldnt wait and overtook the truck and our van and the car collided.
The police has done our driver for careless driving and nothing to the car overtaking and the insurance company has deemed our driver is at fault.
You are conflating unexpected and unnecessary. The whole point of an "emergency" stop is that there is an actual emergency. Also I apologise as I did type about two car lenghts but clarified in a later post it was about 2 seconds. I was deemed by my insurance company to have been driving at a reasonable distance for any reasonably expected emergency (NOTE: The law is very clear and the clue is in the name... emergency stop and there clearly was no emergency in my scenario. That simple fact is why the other person was deemed 100% responsible.
Like it or not I was deemed to have done absolutely nothing wrong. Not arrogance, just the law really.
FWIW, I don't tailgate and leave a reasonable gap based on this exprience (and many others both before and since)
Last edited:
Soldato
I'm not. If there had been a genuine emergency that you hadn't seen, you wouldn't have magically been able to stop any quicker; you still would have gone into the back of her, because you were either too close or not paying attention.
What I see a lot are people that are so eager to join from a slip that they tail gate the person joining in front of them which they believe are doing it too slowly, and position their car to stick out more than theirs which blocks the view of the first car trying to join the slip. The front car on the slip then panics as they can't see if it's clear and often brakes, further annoying the impatient car which in the end tends to just fly out aggressively often even before the front car has even joined. I saw an accident happen where two cars came together in this way and one of them fish tailed straight left off the carriageway into a field. Mental.
Last edited:
Man of Honour
On the flip side there's a lot of people who seem to think reaching the heady speed of 35mph down a long slip road to join a motorway is acceptable
It was a very long time ago, but I did once see someone joining a free flowing motorway from a slip road where they and a car on the motorway were both so determined to give way to the other than they both came to a complete halt side by side when the slip road ran out.
Luckily it was fairly quiet - but that just makes it even more bewildering that they couldn't resolve the issue before it reached that point. For instance, the car on the motorway already could have easily moved out to lane 2 at any point during the situation. I was viewing it from a few hundred yards back (initially) and there were maybe 2 or 3 cars between me and them when I spotted what was going on.
Last edited:
And those that go down to 35mph on the live driving lane because they are about to leave on the upcoming slip. Driving standards have certainly gone way down in the last decade imo.
Soldato
Yup...
But surely the worst thing to do as the car behind them is sit right on their bumper so that you too are forced to join at 35mph? If they want to try their best to collect a HGV then give them plenty of space to do so and stay clear of the fallout.
You can usually tell they're going to do it, so I just hang right back until they're out of the way so I can reach a decent speed by the time I need to join
Last edited:
Caporegime
You are. The law views both very differently. There wasn't an emergency ergo her stop was not required.