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After moving from the UK to the US fifteen years ago, I was amazed at certain practices that are common in the US: tailgating, weaving and undertaking are ubiq

After moving from the UK to the US fifteen years ago, I was amazed at certain practices that are common in the US: tailgating, weaving and undertaking are ubiquitous here. I also noticed that a significant fraction of drivers don't know how to use acceleration lanes; they wait at the beginning of the lane until they can pull directly into the main flow of traffic. Tailgating and weaving are probably so common because many drivers do not see left lanes as overtaking lanes, but rather seem to have a favourite lane that they always use; other drivers must navigate around them. Also, the driving test in the UK takes about 1 hour, with 40 minutes of driving in all conditions (highway, urban, overtaking, merging, emergency stop, three-point turn, parallel parking in an actual parking space, etc.). For my American test, I had less than ten minutes of driving - I took a right out of the test center, drove for 1/2 mile, took a left then three rights and headed back to the test center, went round the back and parallel parked between bollards that had at least two parking spaces between them. That got me my license. It's just a different culture here - driving is seen as a right, not a privilege.

_delirium 11y ago
> It's just a different culture here - driving is seen as a right, not a privilege. Partly that's because in huge parts of the country, it's effectively a necessity to be able to drive in order to get to work, buy groceries, etc., since public transit outside of a few urban cores is very spotty (often nonexistent). Therefore removing someone's license, or not letting them have one in the first place, is seen as a very serious matter that could greatly complicate the person earning a living.
- mondoshawan 11y ago
  That's because most of the U.S. Is rural, not urban, and highly spread out. Public transit just isn't practical when you have states the size of multiple EU countries and people haven't well centralized into tall cities. The further east you go, the better it is.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    I'm just commenting on why people consider having a car a necessity in the U.S.; the reasons for it are more complex. Population density is one reason, but infrastructure planning and preferences is a big part of it. Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska, so those huge expanses on their own don't make public-transit impractical (they do complicate intercity rail, but that's a different issue). Urban sprawl does make things more difficult, but doing better than the current state would still be quite possible in many cities. For example, taking the two most recent cities I've lived in, Houston and Copenhagen have closer population densities than people may think in the majority of their commute basin. If you draw a circle with radius roughly 30 km from each city's downtown, both have a density of about 1,000/km^2. Yet Copenhagen has 5 commuter rail lines, a subway, and an extensive 24-hour bus network, while Houston has 3 light-rail lines and a pretty bad bus network. So of course it's harder to get around in Houston without a car, even in the dense parts (for example, it's a huge pain to get from a high-rise condo in the Galleria area to an office building downtown, even though these are both dense areas and only about 15km apart). Houston is slowly improving in the past 10 years, though.
    - rsync 11y ago
      "Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska" Yes, that's true ... but they only just got there. They, or their parents likely grew up in a much more rural, sparser population density. So in the same way that it's going to take a generation or three to convince folks not to eat as much as a farmer needs to eat to do manual labor all day, it will also take a generation or three to convince folks that they don't need to start an engine to run every errand. much of american habits, beliefs and culture are heavily derived from rural farming life.
      - _delirium 11y ago
        It's a complex issue, but I see American car culture as much more recent and derived from suburbia, rather than from rural farm life. Very few people in the era when the majority of Americans were farmers had cars, because they were very expensive, and patterns of daily life didn't involve driving the kinds of distances to big freeway strip malls that you see today (neither freeways nor strip malls existed). The family may have had a tractor which was sometimes used to drive into town or a bigger city (or a horse was used instead), but driving daily to the Super Wal-Mart is a post-urbanization trend. It's anecdotal, but certainly none of the farming background in my family involved car culture. My great-grandfather lived in a small farming town in Kansas, and they didn't own a car. The town, despite being small, was very centralized around a compact "main street" where all the shops were in walking distance of each other, pretty typical of any Midwestern town prior to WW2. People who lived outside of town either rode into town on a horse, took a tractor in, hitched a ride in, or walked. If they needed to go longer distances, they used this method to get to the nearest town with a train station, and took the train. They bought a car when? When they moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s. The rise of car culture and suburbia also led to most of these traditional compact farm towns turning into what you see today, with old downtowns are that are abandoned or semi-abandoned, replaced by a string of strip malls on the bypass freeway—a bypass freeway that in most cases was built in the 1950s or '60s, well after most Americans lived in cities.
- federico3 11y ago
  >...in huge parts of the country, it's effectively a necessity to be able to drive... In many European countries sprawls are illegal. Roads, buildings and public transportation are planned to avoid large low-density cities.
mondoshawan 11y ago
It varies upon the state. California is pretty lenient -- I've seen people actually cheat on the written tests (10 true false questions!) and not be called on it. Some don't even have a driving test! In AZ, I had to take a long form multiple choice test of 40 questions plus a 30 minute practical demonstrating my understanding of the dimensions of the car, parallel parking, urban, highway, and rural driving.
helipad 11y ago
I too moved from the UK to the US and the roads feel incredibly unsafe. In Michigan, for example, there are terrible potholes. Drivers also often in beat-up cars, often related to high auto insurance – that may create an attitude of not caring as much about bumps. They'd never pass an MOT in the UK. Drivers tailgate, text on their phone, overtake on any side and regularly demonstrably drunk.
- newman314 11y ago
  The running joke is that Michigan roads are ALWAYS under construction. I suspect that has to do more with "job creation" rather than a desire to have good roads. After all, there are plenty of other places with similar weather without the horrendous roads.
  - TheCowboy 11y ago
    It probably has more to do with Michigan spending the least on roads out of all 50 states. Michigan has been hit hard, with Detroit as a symbol of that malaise. If you don't have the budget to spare on upkeep, then there will always been something that needs to be repaired.
    - newman314 11y ago
      I don't know how long you think this malaise has been going on but the roads were already crap 20+ years ago. PS. I find it ironic that Michigan was voted best state to live in.
tzs 11y ago
The shortness of your driving test may have been partially due to your already having been licensed in another jurisdiction. I believe that some states test new drivers more extensively then they test experienced drivers.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  When you move from one state to another state, that is definitely the case. I would have had to just take a written test and then would have received my license. International individuals are almost always required to take the full driving test simply because driving is so different in other countries and a lot of stuff doesn't apply to the US. I too learned in the UK, and when I moved to the US I still took driving lessons for a few weeks before taking the test because driving on US roads is dramatically different from the UK and there is a lot of little nuances to get used to.
- kodis 11y ago
  Maryland has recently eliminated the parallel parking test from their driver's exam. In my experience, this was the only part of the test that required any significant amount of practice.
moron4hire 11y ago
I've driven all over Ireland, Scotland, and Germany and saw just as much road idiocy as in the US.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  But your standards of bad driving are based on what you're used to in the US. So things that we consider bad practice wouldn't even flag on your radar. So, yes, people make the same high level driving mistakes in the US and around europe. The problem the US has is that the normal day to day driving is so much worse. Tailgating in particular is extremely common in the US. It scares the heck out of me when idiots behind me driving within two car length of me at over 65 MpH even when there is space enough behind them that they could easily double that gap, still arrive at their destination at the same time, and if I needed to stop suddenly they wouldn't rear end me.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    Yet somehow we haven't killed ourselves off yet. I'm just bothered by the wording. To call driving in the US "extraordinarily dangerous" is just hyperbole. It might be quantitatively "more dangerous" than the UK, but there really isn't anything to fear going out on the roads in the US. The way these sorts of articles are written, they make it sound like you need to don a suit of armor and make sure your will is up to date every time you step outside, lest a car comes hurtling off the road and wipes out your entire family. I'm not trying to condone driving drunk, but drunk-driving out in the middle of nowhere like in the shock story cherry-picked for the opening article just isn't as assuredly insta-death as MADD would like you to believe. Yes, tailgating is relatively more dangerous than not tailgating. Is tailgating objectively dangerous? The fact that millions of people do it every day and still live to tell the tail suggests otherwise. "Alcohol is a factor in 1/3rd of road deaths". Yeah, but what factor is it in road survivals? Road statistics have never been conducted in a sound manner.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    It scares the heck out of me when idiots behind me driving within two car length of me at over 65 MpH... Drive here long enough, and you won't even notice those guys. After all what are they really going to do to you? They're going to pass you when the road straightens out so they can see what's coming in the other lane. Let them pass, but at all times pay enough attention to what's in front of you that you'll never need to "stop suddenly". A rear-end accident is always the trailing driver's fault, but the leading driver could always have avoided it by paying more attention to the road, and slowing down when conditions warrant, before it's necessary to suddenly stop. [EDIT: of course there are exceptions, like a friend of mine who had been stopped at a red light for 30 seconds when he got blasted from behind by some blind person...]
ajmurmann 11y ago
Having moved here from Germany I think that people randomly picking their favorite lane is probably the biggest factor. It also makes things incredibly inefficient and driving much less pleasurable. I am convinced that sorting cars by speed with slow cars on the right would increase throughput dramatically. Without that a road with as diverse speeds as the Autobahn would be impossible. US freeways have to accommodate a much smaller range of speeds and still fail because it's so badly organized. Given that Germany has much higher speed limits and still fewer fatalities per mile driven, I would definitely focus on giving tickets for overtaking on the right and not speeding up on the on ramp. That shit makes things dangerous for everyone and provides benefits to no one. It's just plain stupid. I would implement draconic penalties for that shit.
- leeoniya 11y ago
  Having recently traveled to Germany, I have to say that while the passing rules are great, the Autobahn experience is not. The frequent drastic speed limit changes (from none to 50kph or even 30kph) as you pass through small rural towns is very annoying and takes a lot of concentration not to enter a town too fast and get an automated photo taken.
  - bildung 11y ago
    Just to clear this up a bit: In Germany you have the Autobahn (the fasted type of roadway, often without speed limit) and the Bundesstraße (speed limit of 100kph, mostly only one lane per direction). The Autobahn never passes through towns or villages, only Bundesstraße and smaller road types do.
  - ajmurmann 11y ago
    As someone else pointed out, the Autobahn doesn't ever go through towns or villages. However, I agree that the frequent drastic speed limit changes on the Bundesstraße are a pain. I am not sure however what a good solution would be. You could lower the speed limit between towns, raise it the towns or build out the road in the city more and keep the limit higher like happens on the 101 when you go through some towns in the central valley. But that has other huge downsides, like being painfully slow or increasing the risks or ruining the towns. Having a town every 1-2 miles might just result in this.
heimatau 11y ago
Solid breakdown. I wish in America we'd encourage both. Like the DMV could have a 'basic DL' and an 'advanced DL' and it comes with perks like lower insurance, heck maybe even lower gas prices (ex: pay less in taxes on gas). This system would be elaborate and costly but...I think the financial cost is small compared to the possible benefits of encouraging an educated/skilled driver.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Insurance companies offer a somewhat similar discount, if you agree to a gps monitor. They could certainly offer lower rates to drivers that pass a skills test, but I doubt they care to (just because I sort of doubt it would be a better predictor than the information they already use (age and driving history being the big ones)).
ams6110 11y ago
Tailgating and weaving are caused mostly by frustration due to improper lane usage. It is the law everywhere that on a multi-lane road, the left lanes are for overtaking and slower traffic needs to keep to the right. However it's rarely enforced. Several states (Indiana being one) have recently enacted new laws that allow ticketing drivers who are driving at the posted speed limit but blocking traffic in the left lane. So even if traffic coming up from behind you is exceeding the speed limit, you are not permitted to block the left lane.

_delirium 11y ago

> It's just a different culture here - driving is seen as a right, not a privilege. Partly that's because in huge parts of the country, it's effectively a necessity to be able to drive in order to get to work, buy groceries, etc., since public transit outside of a few urban cores is very spotty (often nonexistent). Therefore removing someone's license, or not letting them have one in the first place, is seen as a very serious matter that could greatly complicate the person earning a living.

mondoshawan 11y ago
That's because most of the U.S. Is rural, not urban, and highly spread out. Public transit just isn't practical when you have states the size of multiple EU countries and people haven't well centralized into tall cities. The further east you go, the better it is.
- _delirium 11y ago
  I'm just commenting on why people consider having a car a necessity in the U.S.; the reasons for it are more complex. Population density is one reason, but infrastructure planning and preferences is a big part of it. Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska, so those huge expanses on their own don't make public-transit impractical (they do complicate intercity rail, but that's a different issue). Urban sprawl does make things more difficult, but doing better than the current state would still be quite possible in many cities. For example, taking the two most recent cities I've lived in, Houston and Copenhagen have closer population densities than people may think in the majority of their commute basin. If you draw a circle with radius roughly 30 km from each city's downtown, both have a density of about 1,000/km^2. Yet Copenhagen has 5 commuter rail lines, a subway, and an extensive 24-hour bus network, while Houston has 3 light-rail lines and a pretty bad bus network. So of course it's harder to get around in Houston without a car, even in the dense parts (for example, it's a huge pain to get from a high-rise condo in the Galleria area to an office building downtown, even though these are both dense areas and only about 15km apart). Houston is slowly improving in the past 10 years, though.
  - rsync 11y ago
    "Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska" Yes, that's true ... but they only just got there. They, or their parents likely grew up in a much more rural, sparser population density. So in the same way that it's going to take a generation or three to convince folks not to eat as much as a farmer needs to eat to do manual labor all day, it will also take a generation or three to convince folks that they don't need to start an engine to run every errand. much of american habits, beliefs and culture are heavily derived from rural farming life.
    - _delirium 11y ago
      It's a complex issue, but I see American car culture as much more recent and derived from suburbia, rather than from rural farm life. Very few people in the era when the majority of Americans were farmers had cars, because they were very expensive, and patterns of daily life didn't involve driving the kinds of distances to big freeway strip malls that you see today (neither freeways nor strip malls existed). The family may have had a tractor which was sometimes used to drive into town or a bigger city (or a horse was used instead), but driving daily to the Super Wal-Mart is a post-urbanization trend. It's anecdotal, but certainly none of the farming background in my family involved car culture. My great-grandfather lived in a small farming town in Kansas, and they didn't own a car. The town, despite being small, was very centralized around a compact "main street" where all the shops were in walking distance of each other, pretty typical of any Midwestern town prior to WW2. People who lived outside of town either rode into town on a horse, took a tractor in, hitched a ride in, or walked. If they needed to go longer distances, they used this method to get to the nearest town with a train station, and took the train. They bought a car when? When they moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s. The rise of car culture and suburbia also led to most of these traditional compact farm towns turning into what you see today, with old downtowns are that are abandoned or semi-abandoned, replaced by a string of strip malls on the bypass freeway—a bypass freeway that in most cases was built in the 1950s or '60s, well after most Americans lived in cities.
federico3 11y ago
>...in huge parts of the country, it's effectively a necessity to be able to drive... In many European countries sprawls are illegal. Roads, buildings and public transportation are planned to avoid large low-density cities.

mondoshawan 11y ago

It varies upon the state. California is pretty lenient -- I've seen people actually cheat on the written tests (10 true false questions!) and not be called on it. Some don't even have a driving test! In AZ, I had to take a long form multiple choice test of 40 questions plus a 30 minute practical demonstrating my understanding of the dimensions of the car, parallel parking, urban, highway, and rural driving.

helipad 11y ago

I too moved from the UK to the US and the roads feel incredibly unsafe. In Michigan, for example, there are terrible potholes. Drivers also often in beat-up cars, often related to high auto insurance – that may create an attitude of not caring as much about bumps. They'd never pass an MOT in the UK. Drivers tailgate, text on their phone, overtake on any side and regularly demonstrably drunk.

newman314 11y ago
The running joke is that Michigan roads are ALWAYS under construction. I suspect that has to do more with "job creation" rather than a desire to have good roads. After all, there are plenty of other places with similar weather without the horrendous roads.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  It probably has more to do with Michigan spending the least on roads out of all 50 states. Michigan has been hit hard, with Detroit as a symbol of that malaise. If you don't have the budget to spare on upkeep, then there will always been something that needs to be repaired.
  - newman314 11y ago
    I don't know how long you think this malaise has been going on but the roads were already crap 20+ years ago. PS. I find it ironic that Michigan was voted best state to live in.

tzs 11y ago

The shortness of your driving test may have been partially due to your already having been licensed in another jurisdiction. I believe that some states test new drivers more extensively then they test experienced drivers.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
When you move from one state to another state, that is definitely the case. I would have had to just take a written test and then would have received my license. International individuals are almost always required to take the full driving test simply because driving is so different in other countries and a lot of stuff doesn't apply to the US. I too learned in the UK, and when I moved to the US I still took driving lessons for a few weeks before taking the test because driving on US roads is dramatically different from the UK and there is a lot of little nuances to get used to.
kodis 11y ago
Maryland has recently eliminated the parallel parking test from their driver's exam. In my experience, this was the only part of the test that required any significant amount of practice.

moron4hire 11y ago

I've driven all over Ireland, Scotland, and Germany and saw just as much road idiocy as in the US.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
But your standards of bad driving are based on what you're used to in the US. So things that we consider bad practice wouldn't even flag on your radar. So, yes, people make the same high level driving mistakes in the US and around europe. The problem the US has is that the normal day to day driving is so much worse. Tailgating in particular is extremely common in the US. It scares the heck out of me when idiots behind me driving within two car length of me at over 65 MpH even when there is space enough behind them that they could easily double that gap, still arrive at their destination at the same time, and if I needed to stop suddenly they wouldn't rear end me.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Yet somehow we haven't killed ourselves off yet. I'm just bothered by the wording. To call driving in the US "extraordinarily dangerous" is just hyperbole. It might be quantitatively "more dangerous" than the UK, but there really isn't anything to fear going out on the roads in the US. The way these sorts of articles are written, they make it sound like you need to don a suit of armor and make sure your will is up to date every time you step outside, lest a car comes hurtling off the road and wipes out your entire family. I'm not trying to condone driving drunk, but drunk-driving out in the middle of nowhere like in the shock story cherry-picked for the opening article just isn't as assuredly insta-death as MADD would like you to believe. Yes, tailgating is relatively more dangerous than not tailgating. Is tailgating objectively dangerous? The fact that millions of people do it every day and still live to tell the tail suggests otherwise. "Alcohol is a factor in 1/3rd of road deaths". Yeah, but what factor is it in road survivals? Road statistics have never been conducted in a sound manner.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  It scares the heck out of me when idiots behind me driving within two car length of me at over 65 MpH... Drive here long enough, and you won't even notice those guys. After all what are they really going to do to you? They're going to pass you when the road straightens out so they can see what's coming in the other lane. Let them pass, but at all times pay enough attention to what's in front of you that you'll never need to "stop suddenly". A rear-end accident is always the trailing driver's fault, but the leading driver could always have avoided it by paying more attention to the road, and slowing down when conditions warrant, before it's necessary to suddenly stop. [EDIT: of course there are exceptions, like a friend of mine who had been stopped at a red light for 30 seconds when he got blasted from behind by some blind person...]

ajmurmann 11y ago

Having moved here from Germany I think that people randomly picking their favorite lane is probably the biggest factor. It also makes things incredibly inefficient and driving much less pleasurable. I am convinced that sorting cars by speed with slow cars on the right would increase throughput dramatically. Without that a road with as diverse speeds as the Autobahn would be impossible. US freeways have to accommodate a much smaller range of speeds and still fail because it's so badly organized. Given that Germany has much higher speed limits and still fewer fatalities per mile driven, I would definitely focus on giving tickets for overtaking on the right and not speeding up on the on ramp. That shit makes things dangerous for everyone and provides benefits to no one. It's just plain stupid. I would implement draconic penalties for that shit.

leeoniya 11y ago
Having recently traveled to Germany, I have to say that while the passing rules are great, the Autobahn experience is not. The frequent drastic speed limit changes (from none to 50kph or even 30kph) as you pass through small rural towns is very annoying and takes a lot of concentration not to enter a town too fast and get an automated photo taken.
- bildung 11y ago
  Just to clear this up a bit: In Germany you have the Autobahn (the fasted type of roadway, often without speed limit) and the Bundesstraße (speed limit of 100kph, mostly only one lane per direction). The Autobahn never passes through towns or villages, only Bundesstraße and smaller road types do.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  As someone else pointed out, the Autobahn doesn't ever go through towns or villages. However, I agree that the frequent drastic speed limit changes on the Bundesstraße are a pain. I am not sure however what a good solution would be. You could lower the speed limit between towns, raise it the towns or build out the road in the city more and keep the limit higher like happens on the 101 when you go through some towns in the central valley. But that has other huge downsides, like being painfully slow or increasing the risks or ruining the towns. Having a town every 1-2 miles might just result in this.

heimatau 11y ago

Solid breakdown. I wish in America we'd encourage both. Like the DMV could have a 'basic DL' and an 'advanced DL' and it comes with perks like lower insurance, heck maybe even lower gas prices (ex: pay less in taxes on gas). This system would be elaborate and costly but...I think the financial cost is small compared to the possible benefits of encouraging an educated/skilled driver.

maxerickson 11y ago
Insurance companies offer a somewhat similar discount, if you agree to a gps monitor. They could certainly offer lower rates to drivers that pass a skills test, but I doubt they care to (just because I sort of doubt it would be a better predictor than the information they already use (age and driving history being the big ones)).

ams6110 11y ago

Tailgating and weaving are caused mostly by frustration due to improper lane usage. It is the law everywhere that on a multi-lane road, the left lanes are for overtaking and slower traffic needs to keep to the right. However it's rarely enforced. Several states (Indiana being one) have recently enacted new laws that allow ticketing drivers who are driving at the posted speed limit but blocking traffic in the left lane. So even if traffic coming up from behind you is exceeding the speed limit, you are not permitted to block the left lane.