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As an RV-driver, I try my best to use the pull outs when I can. There are a few complications, though. First is the visibility of these pull-outs is often very

• deleted 3y ago
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• wesleytodd 3y ago
  Hey John!! Wes here, sitting in the shade of my RV right now. Funny to hear the last line, because mine says the same thing about when I am driving. And when she is driving she literally tell me "fuck em, I will drive how I want" lol.
  • JohnDotAwesome 3y ago
    New number, whodis
  • e40 3y ago
    > "fuck em, I will drive how I want" Says the same thing to people in the US (and elsewhere??) that drive in the freeway's fast lane holding everyone up for MILES. That is one of the most annoying things I face regularly on the road.
    • wesleytodd 3y ago
      I hate people who do this, nd it is probably why my wife has such a reaction, it is more about me pestering her too much than her actually wanting to ride in the fast lane. Backseat driving is a bad habit of mine. But one thing I have learned by driving 50k miles these past few years is that you never actually get there meaningfully faster. So really, everyone is better off if they just slow down and hit that cruise control.
      • idopmstuff 3y ago
        > But one thing I have learned by driving 50k miles these past few years is that you never actually get there meaningfully faster. So really, everyone is better off if they just slow down and hit that cruise control. Depends what you're driving on. If it's a freeway where you're going to hit stretches of traffic anyway or roads where there's stop signs and lights, sure. When I'm on the 5 going from SF to SD, though, yeah, the clown who's doing 60 in the left lane for miles while holding me up is very much increasing the amount of time I have to spend on the road.
        • bigyikes 3y ago
          Yeah. Going a bit faster on your morning commute won’t change much. But it does legitimately add up on longer drives. Not to mention, waiting behind a needlessly slow driver is just annoying. Mental costs are real, especially when operating heavy machinery.
          • DangitBobby 3y ago
            It adds up over a week of morning commute as well.
        • wombatpm 3y ago
          Chicago to Minneapolis is approximately 420 miles. At 60mph that’s a 7 hr drive. At 70mph it’s 6 hrs. At 80 it’s 5 hrs 15 min. When I was making that drive every other week I hated the slow pokes. There are only some many times you can look forward to a stop in Tomah, WI
  • darig 3y ago
    [dead]
  • NikolaNovak 3y ago
    Lol, my wife has an aunt that's famous for this. She'll go whatever speed she wants in whatever lane she wants on a major 4-6 lane hwy (401 in Toronto) and will righteously swerve her finger at people flashing their lights and honking behind her: "you can GO AROUND!". (For record and clarification I do not condone that approach :)
    • deleted 3y ago
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• teddyh 3y ago
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  • Beldin 3y ago
    No, not really. Your own safety is concern #1 when driving. For a very simple reason: if you're not safe yourself, you cannot make it safer for others. Others will have different ideas on what is safe. They may feel comfortable breaking traffic rules or pushing you(r vehicle) past your/its safety limits. Some have new cars and new tires and can go much faster than others in slippery conditions. Spoiler: none of that is ever an excuse. Not with traffic police, not with accident investigators, not with emergency services. I don't know what condition your vehicle is in. I don't know how worn out your brakes are, how much grip your tires have. I don't know what happens in your car above that certain speed. I don't need to know; I need to be able to rely on you to operate your vehicle sufficiently safely. That is: such that it doesn't make the roads less safe for me.
• paulirwin 3y ago
  Definitely agree with the first and second points above. I absolutely will if I can see it with enough time to safely slow the RV, and the terrain doesn't look like I might blow a tire or damage the RV doing it. I'm usually less concerned about time when traveling in the RV. I try to do what I can to build up good karma with other drivers, but it's not always a good idea to pull off.
• fsckboy 3y ago
  > says I have "overly-considerate disorder" and I need to make our safety #1 and stop caring about other people so damn much I can't speak about your (w|l)ife, but in my (w|l)ife, people who say this are the people who personally enjoy taking advantage of my nature, and my "overly considerate behavior" is only pointed out when someone else seems to be getting benefit at the expense of my (w|l)ife; i.e it's a statement of selfishness.
  • mym1990 3y ago
    I've read this 6 times and still can't make any sense of it.
    • jkingsman 3y ago
      Can't tell if you're joking or not, but this commenter (fsckboy) is using programming/regex-like syntax to write "wife/life" as "(w|l)ife", indicating that, although the parent commenter (JohnDotAwesome) is referring directly to their wife, the commenter (fsckboy) has found it to be true throughout their life AND coming directly from their wife. In other words, both fsckboy's wife and misc. people in their life tend to only point out that fsckboy is being "overly considerate" when it appears that fsckboy is letting someone benefit from their considerate nature. The implication is that fsckboy considers the behavior as being kind and/or safe, while their wife/companions think of it as being taken advantage of. The broad concept of this exchange concerns where the line is between being considerate and being taken advantage of, and how others might be incentivized to view that one way or the other.
      • tsimionescu 3y ago
        It's more than that - fsckboy also believes that the people who point this out to them are doing so because they normally enjoy being the only ones taking advantage of fsckboy, and are incensed when others get to take advantage too (in their view).
        • SiempreViernes 3y ago
• nohankyou 3y ago
  On the other side. someone with road rage isn't going to care about others so much either (you) and possibly risk their own life, and yours, just out of frustration. Being excessively considerate of others on the road is safer from my experience.
• prawn 3y ago
  Just wanted to confirm those first three points. I keep a 25' converted bus in California for when we fly to the US for holidays. I really dislike holding people up, so will turn out whenever possible, but... There isn't always advance signage, so you often see them at the last second and don't have time to check the quality of the approach, check if the person behind you has enough warning, etc. They're always far poorer quality than the road itself, so you're aggressively decelerating a heavy vehicle in usually mountainous conditions, approaching a 4"+ drop into ragged pavement or gravel. I've hit some of those spots at speed and it's felt like the vehicle was going to fall apart. And yes, often you're going slowly because you've just let a few cars past and reentered the road, just for another person to drive up behind you and start the whole game again. It's very very rare to find signed turnouts that are good and long enough that it's trivial to pull off the road at a reasonable speed, let people through, and then continue on without just creating more problems. I remember turnouts in NW Idaho or closer to Spokane maybe where the signage suggested you were meant to use the shoulders to let cars pass, but they were really narrow and I wasn't sure how exactly they were meant to be used? Anyone familiar with that area? If it's not wide enough to get fully out of the lane, wouldn't the passing car just overtake using the opposite lane anyway?
  • kortilla 3y ago
    The act of slowing down and pulling to the shoulder is a clear indicator that another car can pass you without having to go super fast like a normal overtake. It takes far less oncoming traffic distance to pass someone going 20 in the shoulder than 50 in the regular lane. You could achieve the same effect going 20 in the lane if you could clearly signal you intended to stay slow so the other person could pass.
    • prawn 3y ago
      Are you referencing that Idaho scenario? This generally assumes the shoulder is long enough, that the car behind you can see it and realise that's what's happening, that there is visibility, etc. From memory, in that Idaho (?) case while the visibility was good and it was generally a straight road, the shoulder was full of debris and unmaintained bushes. Also the shoulder is often a puncture risk. Here in Australia, the road trains will often signal when it's safe for you to overtake them - they're seated higher with better visibility, have far better lights for night driving, etc. But I always hear that their employers/industry discourage them from doing this, I assume out of fear of liability. I've driven x0k miles in the US and tried signalling like this when I can tell someone desperately wants to overtake me ("go now, it's clear ahead"), but almost no one understands the intention. IMO, most RV/truck/etc drivers dislike holding up traffic as much as the traffic dislikes being held up!
• wffurr 3y ago
  Are those terribly paved slow vehicle lanes a California thing? In New England they are the exact same quality as the other lane. I have never once had to navigate a drop to let faster traffic pass.
  • mint2 3y ago
    That sounds like a passing lane, we have those too. Those are usually nice although occasionally they are only long enough for 1-2 cars to safely pass. It doesn’t help that slow vehicles seem to often speed up for passing lanes. But a pull out is just that. It’s a pull out. They are typically very short such that one has to pull in and fully stop. They are often found are on narrow roads in windy coastal, mountain or river canyons where putting in a passing lane is not feasible.
    • wffurr 3y ago
      I don't know why anyone would expect a vehicle to pull off onto one of those just to let people pass.... So weird. I'd expect that to only be for someone who actually wants to stop and take a rest or something.
      • mint2 3y ago
        Oh I dunno maybe because it’s courteous and not selfish, or maybe it could be because posted signage often informs drivers that it’s Mandatory for slower vehicles to pull over if x number of cars are following. Yeah why would people expect anyone to do that?
        • wffurr 3y ago
          An RV driving 50 doesn’t seem like a big problem to drive behind. I guess I expect people to be reasonable, but comments in HN should have taught me better by now.
• jiveturkey 3y ago
  I personally believe non-use of pullouts is more about the sorry state of the other drivers, not the RV drivers. (Assuming reasonable road conditions, which as you note, is not always the case.) > coming to a complete stop You're not meant to come to a stop. That absolutely kills what momentum you do have. It's exceptionally difficult to start a heavy vehicle from a stop. You're meant to pull out, maybe slow down a little, then pull back in, cars be damned. Some cars will pass, maybe not all. The new lead set of cars will get by at the next pullout, and so on in incremental fashion. But what happens in practice is that the first or 2nd idiot behind you does not prepare in advance and then does not race like mad when you go into the pullout, thereby allowing as many following cars as possible to also make the pass. Even if that first car did execute it correctly, the 2nd car likely does not. Then the 2nd or maybe 3rd car is "in the breach" when the pullout lane ends, blocking your (RV) re-entry and forcing you to stop. Then you're doubly fooked. You have to start from a complete stop and you're at the very end of the pullout lane, with no speedup zone at all. ... this is why we can't have nice things ... My daily commute involves a 2 lane highway (ie, 1 lane each direction) with a pullout for slow moving vehicles. Semi trucks and other heavy construction type vehicles use this road a lot, as it's the only viable route. They do almost always use the pullout, but they pull back in at the end without regard for anyone in the traffic lane. They have to -- they are even worse than any RV on getting started from a stop again. So I see this crap driving from the auto drivers almost every day. If I happen to be the first car waiting behind a truck, I race on past and then it's always the case that only 1 other car in a long line also make it past, when 6-7 should be making it. I also frequently witness the slow passing fool have to slam his brakes as the truck re-enters the lane. I don't fault any RV for not using the pullout lanes.
  • yencabulator 3y ago
    > You're not meant to come to a stop. That absolutely kills what momentum you do have. It's exceptionally difficult to start a heavy vehicle from a stop. You're meant to pull out, maybe slow down a little, then pull back in, cars be damned. The "cars be damned" part would be a collision, with the RV at fault. No thanks. And the pullouts are not long enough to keep rolling, you have to come to a stop to have a chance to pick up speed again when there's a gap, otherwise you've just rolled to the end of the pullout and now you're sitting still with no room to accelerate before pulling into traffic.