What to do when you have a tailgater behind you:
- Foot off the gas.
- Wait until the tailgater tries to overtake you.
- PIT maneuver.
- Keep driving safely.
Is this lady using her phone while driving, after speeding by 20MPH and thinking it’s a flex? If she uses it at 20MPH I’d bet she uses it at 70 MPH too! Couldn’t this have waited until she was safely off the road?
I expect this is sarcasm (can’t know, because of Poe’s)
But for anyone genuinely thinking this you can see the dashcam source in her glasses reflection.
I was on a 3 lane highway going interstate. Doing 80 in a 65 on the fast lane. Big rig in the middle lane. Slowly gaining and will pass the bog rig.
Then a pickup is coming up in the fast lane TOO FAST. Easily 100mph. She tailgates me. Now boxxed in with me in front and the big rig on her right. A sane person would go in the third lane and pass us since zero other cars around. But no.
She lays on her horn and starts swaying with impatience.
So I match speed with the big rig. Maintaining the box. She honks ways more and sways even more. Shaking her fist at me.I maintain it for another 2 minutes until my wife gets concerned she’ll rear end us and we end up spinning off the highway or under the big rig.
I give in and speed up past the big rig and change lanes to her wacko pass. They speed off.
Yeah it’s never worth it. You never know what people will do.
Very true. Many people act irrationally behind the wheel. Only God knows how pathetic their life must be that they want to risk life and limb to get somewhere 3 minutes faster.
It wasn’t even about going faster at that point.
I was trying to force them to slow down and go around… Instead they went apeshit.
Yeah, better to just get them the fuck away from you ASAP than to be petty. They’re not worth the risk since they’ve already established they’re shitty drivers.
Truly. I’ve been on the motorway before with a dude seemingly angry about something I did, not sure what, that he was chasing me across the motorway even if I went from lane 4 to 1 and back he was there.
Some people are insane. Best to avoid them even if you can handle yourself as some people won’t let it go and not worth the fight if you’re not immediately in danger.
Yep I’d call the cops at that time. Not fucking around.
I’m reminded of a story somebody shared on reddit years ago.
An arborist, working with his team. One of his crew had the chainsaw kick and come back and severely main him. He’s bleeding so fucking fast. They need to get him to hospital, and they can’t afford to wait for the ambulance to arrive.
The woman in front won’t let them past. She’s going slower and slower to make a point. They’re honking at her, but she lines up with another lane to box them in. That car slows down too.
The guy is fading fast.theyre using his shirt to staunch the blood, but it’s not enough. After several minutes, they finally have an opening they can take. They speed past her little car, throwing the bloodsoaked shirt out the window to slap wetly on her windshield.
They meet up with emergency services - first, a cop. The woman pulls over to talk to the cop about their reckless driving. While arguing, the ambulance arrives. The injured crew member, and the storyteller, are taken to hospital.
It’s too late. He dies.
…don’t fuck around man. You never know. It’s no worth it. Do the safe thing and make space or pull over. Safety over spite.
Where are y’all going that you gotta pretend real life is GTA? Ain’t nobody need you that bad. You’re late. Get over it.
Wait, so the dude honked after her because she was speeding 20 above the limit (imo justified), and she’s pretending of taking the high road by slowing down 30 under the limit just to spite him for her being wrong? 🤔
Or maybe it’s oddly phrased and he was going 30 over and the petty lane is justified. (Personally I’d go 40-45, just to be not too slow as to be dangerous).
Wait, so the dude honked after her because she was speeding 20 above the limit (imo justified),
How does this work exactly? It would mean the person honking was also going 20 above the limit. So they sped up so they could honk at the person for speeding?
Just seems like two assholes if you ask me.
Kevin vs Karen.
It’s good to slow down to get the traitor off your ass, but be careful: our traitor zoomed around us and cut us off out of spite. My girlfriend pointed out that behavior like that will get that worthless dumbfuck shot one day.
Sometimes i really wish i had the time to get into a fenderbender, just so that the asshole behind gets their comeuppance.
Not an actual encouragement for break checking idiots, please be safe.
deleted by creator
70 in a 50 zone. Doesn’t matter if its km/h or mph, that’s just idiotic.
exactly, the engineers should never have made a road with that big of a discrepancy between safe speed and listed speed limit
The engineers only make the designed safe speed. Government officials make the listed limit. It used to be EXTREMELY popular for government official to knock 20-25% off the design limit of the road, ironically so they can tell everyone how safe they were.
Traffic engineers in the US make too wide roads that psychologically encourages speeding, the posted speed limit doesn’t matter unless police dedicates significant resources to enforcing it
Everywhere in my town was 25mph until about 10 years ago.
A local politician got a few speeding tickets and went nuts over it, now it varies from 25-60mph. Engineers were brought in to advise on safe limits.
Him getting those tickets was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was so miserable driving so slow on big open roads. I could probably sit down and figure up an insane amount of time I’ve saved over the last decade (if I weren’t an idiot).
Not so great for people walking or cycling though. Higher speeds mean more serious and fatal collisions.
Where these modes of transport mix, 20mph is becoming the default choice in western European countries, there is a global declaration on this. If roads feel like they’re made for higher streets: that’s bad infrastructure design.
https://www.fiafoundation.org/news/stockholm-declaration-focuses-on-reducing-urban-speed
No one is traveling on a bicycle or walking here. These roads are empty, there’s nothing there. I live in one of the most rural places in the country (United States).
It was seriously 20 miles straight with no houses, wide road, 25 mph. In residential areas there are still 25 mph speed limits.
On our 4 lane road, bicycles are not allowed, yet the speed limit was only 35-40.
Where there are sidewalks, the speed limit is 25 mph. If there are buildings, 25 mph.
Empty roads with nothing but fucking trees should not be 25 mph.
In all of my years driving on those roads, I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a bicycle. A couple of those tiny, slow motorcycles, maybe. I guess they call them scooters
And why do you think this is the case? Could it possibly be because the infrastructure is completely designed for cars, and using anything else is just not safe so you’d have to be a madman to go with these options?
Imran sure, I get rural, cars are good for rural areas, but not for towns etc.
Well, I mean, if a person wants to ride a bike 40 miles for 4 1/2 hours to the nearest Walmart I’m sure they could.
About 4,500 people live here and most of them have cars or they’re stuck.
We have public transit but about 30 people use it. My neighbor said it’s a 2.5 hour ordeal to go to the post office when he could be there and back in 20 minutes in a car. He got old and lost his license.
I’m seeing more cities in the US jump onto “20 is Plenty” too!
Was gonna cite 85th percentile speed but TIL on drawbacks
Engineers should absolutely include traffic calming features to get people to naturally slow down, but everyone should drive the limit.
Speed kills, kinetic energy is not linear.
Cars are tonnes of metal hurtling down the road. Thousands upon thousands die every year, and since the increased prevalence of massive US style trucks fatalities have RISEN, undoing decades of progress. (Both in the US, and elsewhere)
People driving 20 over the limit are arseholes (or have been influenced by car centric infrastructure and culture). Change my mind.
Speeding is never okay. Just that lots of people have convinced themselves it’s no big deal.
Edit because of downvotes: https://www.bts.gov/content/motor-vehicle-safety-data
Y’all are really justifying some shitty behaviour. Yeah, I get it, streets are designed shittily, and feels like it’s fine to speed (especially, from what I can see, in the US), but this doesn’t absolve you from doing the right thing.
Like, if it were 5 (km/h) over, I could perhaps forgive you. But downvoting me for suggesting 20 mph over is arsehole behaviour? You don’t deserve a licence.
Fuck these carbrains putting their feelings over completely savable lives.
USA is cooked (and Australia, somewhat cooked, since people are buying ridiculously sized cars here too).
Don’t speed, you fuckwits. Better yet, take public transport if you live in a city with cilivised transportation (obviously, not your fault if it doesn’t exist).
20 over the speed limit? that’s ridiculous no one should be driving over 25
I get this is a joke, but speed limits shouldn’t be set by politicians (which I’m hearing apparently is/was a thing?). Politicians have a role to play in getting regulations standards re-written by people who understand the decades of research on this.
Speeding is mostly a design issue, but I still expect people actually follow the rules.
Strong Towns, NotJustBikes, City Beautiful, Practical Engineering, among others have made great videos on this topic.
A lot of people justify speeding, and it’s kinda dumb, if you ask me.
Just because you “feel” it’s safe, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Plus, there’s a fantastic way to reduce road deaths, just have fewer cars, switch to public transport, but that takes a long time to implement if the political will doesn’t exist.
I disagree. There are two roads near me with a limit of 55 mph, and traffic on those roads regularly moves at 75-80. Driving 55 becomes dangerous when all of the other traffic is going so much faster, because nobody expects you to be that slow. You risk getting rear-ended, and if traffic is heavy, people who end up behind you now have to merge into a much faster lane of traffic to get around you.
Why don’t they confiscate driving licences and imprison all the criminals who are driving 20-25mph dangerously over the limit?
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
A single cop car on the side of the road can get everybody to magically follow the speed limit.
That’s really dependant on location. I have had plenty of road trips up and down the I5 where groups of cars pass cops on the side of the road going 80, and no one slows down and the cops do nothing. Source: I’m one of those drivers.
same on I10. that bit in texas where the limit goes up to 80 is nice tho
For a minute, maybe. Foot goes back down when the cop’s out of view in the mirrors.
nah, it just gets them to slow to 20 over the limit here
Not personally, no - but the police would only need to catch a handful each day to get things moving a little more safely in the area.
Throw people in jail for driving too fast? That seems pretty extreme.
It’s hard to police speeding on a highway. Typically if you do get pulled over for speeding, it’s because you’re going way faster than those around you. So even in a 55, if everyone’s doing 80, you’ve gotta be doing 95 or more for a cop to single you out and arrest you. (Or maybe the cop has a quota to meet.) And where I live, local cops can’t use radar, so it’s hard to prove how fast you were going.
And then if you do get arrested, you’re most likely to get a ticket and points on your license. Get enough points and they’ll take away your license, but that means you’ve been caught repeatedly. And points expire eventually, plus if you go to your court date and plead not guilty, a lot of the time the judge will just remove the points. So a speeding ticket from years ago generally won’t have any bearing on your life except for the cost of the ticket.
So within reason, you can pretty much speed all the time consequence-free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All fair points for a motorway/highway/freeway/whatever. I’d mistakenly thought the previous post was referring to a smaller local road with a 55mph limit.
I don’t really care so much about what speed people do on motorways, but I have a massive problem with people doing 40-60mph in a 20-30mph limit residential area. Bear in mind where I live in the UK, the cars are driving 2 metres from the front door of everyone’s houses.
Because the road design at fault, not people.
Make roads narrower, and people will drive slower
If everyone is driving that fast and there aren’t accidents happening consistently then the posted limit does not reflect the reality of the road.
Or the road design doesn’t facilitate compliance with the speed limit. This is how policy and guidance on road infrastructure talks about these issues.
I live out in the sticks, and if I don’t go 70, it will take me forever to get where I need to go. Also everyone else is going 70, so the people doing 50 are creating an unsafe situation. It’s the wild west out here.
- Escalates the angry driver situation.
- Takes photos while driving.
Neither driver here is in the right.
I don’t need to be right.
Fuck you Kevin you piece of shit.
Who is Kevin?
Did you even read the post youre commenting in?
Didn’t notice the name 😔
going 70 in a 50
Both drivers deserve to lose their license
Probably not. It could be in the middle of nowhere or on a road where the speed limit hasn’t been evaluated and the state default is 50. There are tons of roads like that in California or even some where the limit is in the 30s but it really shouldn’t be and locals are in the 60s usually.
You, The Master Driver, are amply equipped to decide what the true speed limit should be.
Well if you operate a death machine it would be realy nice if you could follow the rules and not kill somebody. Of course the rules should be reasonable but being unable to follow them means you should not be operating a death machine
There’s no reason to follow unreasonable rules even when you’re driving a death machine. Especially when not following the rules has an essentially near 0 difference in hurting someone with your cage of death(not trying to be sarcastic with cage of death). Many of these roads are designed for much higher speed limits but just have not been evaluated by the government for their speed limit and possibly never will be or they will be evaluated at a much lower than reasonable speed. For example the speed limit of most California freeways is 65 traffic moves at 80 regularly and sometimes when people are feeling frisky up to 90. Neither of those speeds are unreasonable when everyone around you is also doing them and people are used to those situations or understand they will be in those situations. A great example is Germany where parts of their freeways have no speed limit where people are doing in excess of 120 mph and semis are also using it at under 60.
Based on experience, I don’t trust random assholes to determine for themselves when a rule is unreasonable. You’re unreasonable with this take and presumption about yourself. This makes you dangerous to society. You’ll prove that even more as you disagree.
You do not get to determine on your own that your actions have near 0 consequences. That’s some level of psychopathic thought and just reinforces why we have some rules. It’s also a lack of empathy or consideration of others.
You’re breaking a rule operating a dangerous machine, and you’re trying to shrug it off as no big deal. Dangerous.
-
calls random people assholes and psychopaths with little to no provocation
-
claims other people lack empathy and consideration
-
Dude when I said that they have near 0 consequences I was talking about how 90% of the time in these situations there basically no one around doing 150 miles an hour wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Breaking a rule when no one else is around or everyone else around is doing the same thing is not dangerous. In the case of everyone going 15-25 over the limit it’s actually safe. C’mon homie think about it.
I don’t think losing their license is the right approach. I don’t think scolding them is the approach either. I think most people don’t realize that driving is a cooperative event. And to not only accept that and also expand on it helps most road rage go away.
😭 I see the error of my thinking Comrade Stalin. I will do better in the future
Fun little Stalin fact: when the Bolsheviks first took over the Kremlin, food was a scarce commodity. Stalin faked being sick so he could have a whole chicken to himself every day.
Yeah, honking at me. And those flashing lights on the roof of their car are really annoying.
what the hells a ɘɔnɒlυdmɒ
This comment section is a very good case study in why better public transportation is absolutely necessary: a lot of you should not ever drive.