By contrast, in California, residents seem all too willing to drop back to let you merge with them.

if you're a quick study, all it takes is one ticket for refusal to yield (which, if you get argumentative bout things can easily be modified to include following too close).

there are a few other areas in which drivers from michigan differ from californians. i learned to drive in detroit so i was very conscientious bout pedestrians. things may be different now, but back in da day, driving was more than just going from point a to point b; as soon as one got behind the wheel, it was considered a sacred duty to keep feet off the roadway. if ratzo rizzo had ventured into the motor city and tried his lil hoodbanging tactic, he woulda been shipped back to nyc in a bag. and on the bus.

(the first time i drove thru the streets of los angeles, i was flabbergasted to see a guy in a wheelchair nonchalantly begin making his way across lincoln in venice. i hit the gas and swerved into the northbound lanes but he was very skilled and i barely nicked his ass--altho, to be honest, he really had made it onto the sidewalk by then. i remember asking my companion of the moment if my target might be on some kinda drugs which deluded him into thinking a couple white lines could stop a 3 ton vehicle.)

you musta not been here when it was raining or you woulda forgot all our elaborate merging ritual. you aint seen nothin til youve seen .02" of rain turn streets and freeways into demolition derbies. there are few sights more amusing than the look on the face of a driver realizing a few seconds too late the counterproductivity of standing on the brake pedal and and franticaly steering in a direction opposite from the one into which he is skidding.

Anything is better than Maryland drivers... they're just stupid... For example (I have seen this more than once):

3 lanes of the highway are open, but yet the driver feels the need to move from the center lane to the right lane when a car is trying to merge onto the highway...

#1 by kingbee
Monday, May 23, 2005

if you're a quick study, all it takes is one ticket for refusal to yield (which, if you get argumentative bout things can easily be modified to include following too close).

Here in Illinois the car entering the highway is the one that has to yield. I find it odd that it is different elsewhere.

in Illinois the car entering the highway is the one that has to yield. I find it odd that it is different elsewhere.

the examples provided by draginol lead me to believe he's talking about lane merging on a crowded and quickly coagulating freeway.

as far as onramps go, yeah the car entering the stream of traffic is supposed to yield. a lotta times the best way to do that is to go a bit faster than the car which would otherwise be edging you off onto the shoulder.

Drivers in California suck. I really think that when every new car is sold here, the salesman should be required by law to show the new owner how to use the blinkers.

Oh, and the traffic problems, its probably the number of people. In Los Angeles County, there were 9.5 million people there in 2000, as compared to 9.8 million in all of Michigan in the same year.

In Los Angeles County, there were 9.5 million people there in 2000, as compared to 9.8 million in all of Michigan in the same year.

8.5 million reasons for la county to stop coddling pedestrians and expanding offensive/aggressive driving techniques as practiced in detroit, manhattan, etc.

Basically, in Michigan, when roads are supposed to merge into fewer lanes it's expected that people will do it at a reasonable time. So the guy who races down the lane that's about to disappear to the end will frequently get screwed as people won't let him in.

In Calinfornia, they happilly let that guy in which encourages people to screw around and merge at the last second which creates grid lock.

, they happilly let that guy in

happily only in the sense that it's not worth a catching a ticket or a bullet for refusing to do so.

That's OK. People out here in Colorado drive like they're in the NASCAR. They all ride about 6" from your bumper and do about 30 over the speed limit. For the former problem, I like to throw the car into third gear, hit the brakes with both feet for about 50' then take off like a bat out of hell. I've had more than one person almost swerve off the road in suprise.

Did I mention that I can't stand tailgaters?

-- B

After all of this... I'll stay in NY thank you. I went to NH a few times and I made a u-turn on a street that was pretty enpty and people looked at me like I was burning a cross.

Also in NH, you won't dare drive while someone is still in the crosswalk no matter if the light is green or not.


... no I don't have a car, I had to rent one to go to a school to study a biulding for my Architectural class.

Several years of driving a rig cross country has convinced me that the majority of drivers EVERYWHERE don't actually know how to drive.

I think there may be some electronic device in many cars that sends a signal to switch off the brain the moment the ignition fires.

That's why Illinois drivers bug me on the road around here.  That and they tend to drive much, much faster than drivers from other states in the area.  Of course we are just speaking on a general level, but everyone around should follow the rule that a person should merge for those getting onto the interstate off of a ramp.  Unfortunately people don't do this soon enough because so many drivers will not pay attention far enough ahead of their own vehicle to notice some action is coming.  Then, yes, there are the a-holes who cut people off while cars are trying to get out of the way so another driver can merge on.  Another situation is if you're driving in open road and going too slow to make the pass fast enough around another vehicle with a quicker car coming up behind you, you should wait to pass until that fast car is gone.  Too many people cause slow-ups and that segmented congestion because one car decides to pass another while going only 1mph faster!  I believe this is the root cause of that action to pull up and try to stop a slower person from changing lanes, it's because they don't want to be held up by a slowpoke.  But yes, there are the jerks who just cut people off because they're idiots.

 

That is the law in all states. I know of no state where the car entering the highway from a ramp has the right of way.

 

 

Huh? Do you know what the word merge means? Your statement makes no sense at all. The traffic already on the interstate has the right of way and traffic attempting to merge into this traffic is required to yield if unable to merge in a safe manner. If you mean that the traffic already on the interstate should attempt to move over and allow people to merge into traffic, yes that is a common courtesy and one should do so whenever it's SAFE to do so.

 

As a professional driver. not knowing how to properly merge into moving traffic is the single biggest problem I see in every state (followed closely by impatience and selfishness). Every day I see idiots who race down ramps and don't even bother to check the oncoming traffic until they are right at the end of the ramp. Over the years I've seen more accidents caused by people who don't know how to merge than I care to try and count.