Old story my dad used to tell of a friend he had back in the day when we lived on Cape Cod. He often had to cross the canal bridge at night and it’s a notorious place for oncoming traffic to leave their brights on and blind people as they come over the crest of the bridge.
He “acquired” a runway spotlight and hooked it up to his truck. The first time someone came over with their brights on he flicked the switch and turned night to day for about 3 seconds, after which his entire electrical system shorted out and the lights on top of the vehicle he blinded came on.
He’s sitting there in his dark and stalled out vehicle smelling vaguely of burnt plastic while the cop goes all the way across the bridge and comes back to get him… My dad used it as an example of why sometimes you should think things through.
My dad rigged up a semi-truck air horn to a canister of compressed air to make it portable. We used to drive around in a little Ford Fiesta Mark II and hit the horn on slow cars.
Dude, you are so lucky it was me behind you that had a truck with a sturdy metal bumper to keep you from rolling backwards down the hill. The fact that you couldn’t get moving forward on this very steep street and the seeing smoke starting to come out of the underside when you finally negotiated enough to turn around and go downhill means your clutch and/or transmission are just about shot.
So what in the world were you doing going up an equally-steep street just an hour later? You should have been finding other routes that were gentler to take.
I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of money. You’re gonna have even less if either of those completely fails the next time you drive up streets like that. Dude, think and try to prevent an accident from happening.
There are a couple roads near where I grew up which have the following warning, custom written by the borough council:
WARNING: 1:1.8 INCLINE
Drivers of vehicles with low capacity engines or automatic transmissions are hereby strongly advised not to proceed beyond this point.
Every damn day there would be a car pouring black smoke come rattling down the hill backwards.
(edit, I got my grads to ratio mixed up, British signs use incline percentages which make little to no sense to anyone, original roadsigns reads 44% incline, which is roughly the slump height for gravel if I remember right)
Oh what a shame sir, that the cops would pull you off and have a nice discussion with you regarding your road manners after you ignored a solid line and squeezed into the space in front of my car.
Really a shame sir, hope you had a nice chat and got a raffle ticket too.
Was changing lanes twice, over-revving your engine and slamming on your breaks to get from behind to in front of me really worth it? Especially since when the light changed you didn’t notice for a good five seconds?
I so love it when such a person get their just desserts.
A long while ago I stopped at a roadside gas station (fuel) for some gas and a bite to eat. When I departed, some guy in a big, fancy Merc got to the front somehow and flat-out accelerated on the highway…
…speed cops was trapping traffic about 5kms away under a bridge, you could not see them until you were on top of them…
…and I passed Mr Flat-out-Merc getting a good talking-to from the cops.
My pet hate is special snowflakes using the yellow lane/hard shoulder/side of the road to pass slow-moving or stopped traffic just to “get ahead as they’re moar imporkant” than the rest of us plebs stuck in traffic.
And causing even more traffic when they have to merge somewhere in front. Grrrr.
Ugh, merging. Don’t get me started. No so much a lost art as a skill that either hasn’t been taught or most need a refresher course. Around hear, at least. I’ve heard some midwest state settled on zipper-merging and has done a pretty good job of using advertising to train the locals. (It is likely that I may have originally heard about it earlier in this thread.)
Californians definitely don’t know how to merge because they all think they’re the most important person on the road and everyone else is just in their way. It gets worse the closer you get to Los Angeles. I’m convinced that 75% of traffic jams are caused by people who can’t or won’t merge. And whenever someone does the shoulder thing, or (as is more common) doesn’t want to merge until the last second so they can get in front of a few more cars, I yell “nobody let that fucker in”, but someone always does.
Really. When there is traffic, you’ll get allsorts of speshul snowflakes driving on either the left/right hard shoulder or both. And it includes the yellow lane (left/right depending on the country you’re in).
They don’t think of the consequences (blocked emergency services, another accident) and blithely zoom past you chortling to themselves how clever they must be - then they make the traffic even worse when they have to merge back into the stream of obedient drivers.
