Traffic Charlie Foxtrots

Threadus Resurrectus!

Eastbound I-376 at the Ft. Pitt Tunnel. Pittsburgh PA.

Completely frustrating. The only question is if it will be backed up one mile or three.

Special snowflakes using the yellow lane (left or right shoulder of highway) for under- or overtaking.

Due to returning to a “normal” schedule I now drive I-70 every day. Can’t recommend it.

Hoping things change in couple months so I work remotely or off-hours 3 days a week.

I used to do that occasionally when I was younger. But mostly only when someone was being a butthole, like camping in the left (passing) lane next to a slow moving truck.

Between Boston and Cape Cod, there’s at least one highway where the shoulder becomes a legal travel lane during rush hour.

I had a girlfriend at one point where I stayed at her place for a couple nights, then we’d both head to mine for the weekend. We’d drive separately and pass on both shoulders going 20 over the limit, the highway was usually dead, but the wolfpacks just wouldn’t spread out. You’d have 10 miles of empty highway, and then 5 cars clumped together, and then 15 miles of empty highway.

yeah
 good times, I’m lucky I’m alive and didn’t kill anyone.

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What he said. And there are several in the Boston area
 their infrastructure is way, WAY overburdened.

Had a GF for a time in Cincy who had moved from Boston. She wondered why we didn’t use the “breakdown lanes.” She couldn’t believe me when I said that was crazy
 no one did that
 I didn’t believe her until I visit Boston and saw the signs.

That’s something they could really use in LA.

That would be overtaking. Undertaking is something quite different :laughing:

I guess the designers of the two small office buildings expected there to be an insane amount of traffic because they felt the need to put a small roundabout in the entry to the parking lots.

Come to the DC area. Not only do we have the weird shoulder lanes, there are some roads that during the day become HOV only. The entire road is HOV, all lanes. It’s not uncommon to go out at 2pm on a Saturday and get stuck in stop and go traffic. It also doesn’t help that almost no one around here is from here. People are all driving differently. Traffic is hell around here.

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Must be over on your side
 I don’t think Maryland has any ‘all HOV’ roads.

Then again, with changing jobs I’m more Baltimore-focused these days, as I work within spitting difference of B-more now. Traffic still sucks, but in different ways.

Had this lovely pear-shaped TITSUP this morning at around 0300 am. Inconvenienced a lot of people as the R21 had to had both its lanes (north- and southbound) closed.

High-voltage cables can be seen on the right-hand part of the photo. Not fun things to play with.

We are not sure what happened, brake checking by some person, or falling asleep at the wheel, but it will take two days to fix the pylon, during which time the freeway will be closed.

Keep in mind that we drive on the “wrong” side of the road, in case you will wonder at the orientation of the truck.

Traffic was already a miserable mess during rush hour. At least it is weekend, so the impact won’t be as big.

Update to above : electrical engineers have decided to cut the cables in order to allow traffic to proceed.

No doubt they will reroute power to the affected areas via other areas of the power grid and will do a proper job in replacing the damaged pylon instead of doing a McGyver job, which they’ll have to redo at a later stage.

Newer photos will also be posted later.

So, at this stage it is one of the following :

  • brake checking by another driver
  • mechanical failure (steering failure, burst front tyre)
  • pedestrian trying to cross highway in front of truck
  • driver fell asleep
  • attempted suicide
  • attempted hijacking
  • driver’s attention was not on the road (cellphone/tablet)

The driver is in hospital at the moment, critical condition.

Here is a video of examples of many different and some-quite-spacey intersection descriptions.

Interesting vid. Forwarded it to project manglers at work (we are in the traffic segment of the market)

Ah Cities:Skylines. Such a good game, great modability. Just a shame about the horrific RAM usage and flakiness as soon as you even think about loading more than just the DLC attached to the game :rofl:

With the Traffic President mod, used in that video above to mess with light timings, it’s possible to recreate junctions based on ones near yourself that you know become a clusterfuck as soon as anyone even thinks about school letting-out or the rush hours and then redesign it to bloody well work!

We have a ridiculously huge roundabout nearby that also has traffic lights (this is a rant for another time; if you need traffic lights on a roundabout, the roundabout is not fit for purpose) to control the huge amounts of traffic. Below is a rough sketch of the roundabout:

A19A189Rbout

As you can see, not all of the entrances are light controlled, just the highways, so people are used to having to use the roundabout without lights. Why do I bring this up? Well over the Christmas Break, someone crashed and flattened the traffic light controller, so now none of the lights work.

So you’d assume that everyone would remember the bit in the highway code where it says that if traffic lights fail, then you treat a junction like a mini-roundabout (ie, yield to right (left for you guys that drive on the wrong side)) and you treat a roundabout like a regular roundabout (ie, you still yield to right). This sounds simple, right?

Apparently not. Over the past week and a half I have watched people happily just plough their way into the roundabout and then act as if it is everyone else’s fault when they get t-boned by traffic that was already there.

My favourite thing I’ve overheard while in the queue behind a crash so far has been:

Idiot: “Well how was I supposed to know it wasn’t safe to go? How was I supposed to know you weren’t turning off?”
Idiot’s victim: “BY USING YOUR FUCKING EYES. DO YOU THINK I’M TURNING LEFT IF I’M IN THE RIGHT LANE INDICATING RIGHT AND TURNING RIGHT? FUCK OFF!”

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Was Idiot listening to country music?

No, but they were driving an Audi A3 in Stock YouBoughtThisOnCredit White.

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