I’ll start. Stopping distance.
My commute is 95 miles one way to work, so I see a lot of the highway, in the rural part of the US. This means traveling at 70+ mph (112km/h) for almost the entirety of the drive. The amount of other drivers on the road who follow behind someone else with less than a car’s length in front of them because they want to go 20+ over the speed limit is ridiculous. The only time you ever follow someone that close is if you have complete and absolute trust in them, and also understand that it may not even be enough.
For a daily drive, you likely need 2-3 car lengths between you at minimum depending on your speed to accurately avoid hitting the brakes. This doesn’t even take into account the lack of understanding of engine braking…
What concepts do you all think of when it comes to driving that you feel are not well understood by the public at large?
Zip merges really show who the dumb drivers are.
I’m a european who happened to be driving from New Orleans to Houston today, and while there are a few minor things that annoy me about american traffic, seeing miserable attempts at zipper merge on Sam Houston today was what caused me to swear out loud, something I don’t do very often.
EDIT: One thing I do like about driving here, though, is the right-on-red rules.
Beat me to it. People try to jam themselves into traffic right at the bottom of the ramp causing a snarl as opposed to using the acceleration lane. It’s fucking maddening
Come to Pennsylvania, we don’t have acceleration lanes on most of our on ramps. It’s nuts!
I lived in Philly for years. Traffic was gnarly.
My absolute favorite were the ramps in downtown Chicago that just yeeted you right into highway traffic