Are the shoulders big, like everything else, in Texas. Because fuck that; let' em pass me on the left like every other maniac.
Now OTOH if I'm driving there with Texas plates, I'm the one doing the passing.
Unless you're driving farm machinery or something really slow, driving on the shoulder is nuts.
3: For a place too barbaric to have turnouts.
Not the custom here, even out in the Far East.
On the back roads of OH, one waits for a divided line to pass on the other side of the road. When stuck behind the Amish or farm equipment or Amish farm equipment it kind of sucks, because driving at 10mph is a fucking drag and there are lots of hills and thus fewer divided lines.
No, rather let the other guy have a head-on than pick up a nail or 'possum in my tires.
Ya gots to get the mental set right for the end of civilization as we know it. Y'all can see the way the media is preparing us for it, what with "The Walking Dead", "Game of Thrones", "Revolution", and "Above the Salt with the Kardashians", and so on.
What happens if you're driving 50 on the shoulder and come to the top of a hill? You'd better slow down because people stop in the shoulder if they get a flat or need to pee or whatever. Driving the in the shoulder is illegal in sane states.
Some roads also have occasional spots where the shoulder is extra wide, specifically so you can pull over and let faster cars go by.
and come to the top of a hill?
In Texas, assumes facts not in evidence.
An acquaintance/friend was paralyzed and eventually died after trying to PASS on the shoulder. That shit is nuts.
This is stupid. The reason for the double line is to indicate that there is not enough visibility given the speed limit to complete a pass. If you're driving the speed limit, the same applies for pulling over to the shoulder- you have a chance of running into something you can't see far enough in advance before the car has finished passing you.
Or, longer 9.
This [pulling onto the shoulder] is apparently also the custom in Greece, or so the books told me before I decided to drive on mountainous Greek roads.
I had someone undertake me on the hard shoulder on the M4 the other day. That'd NOT be the norm in the UK.
So Greece and Texas. Third world driving is strange.
12 is correct. Living where I do it's easy to forget that any other part of TX exists.
Speaking of apocalypses...
During Katrina, the media said everyone was looting and shooting at rescue helicopters for no reason and eating babies in the refugee camp at the stadium. This time, they are saying everyone is letting people recharge their cell phone on their generator and volunteering to take food to elderly shut ins on the 97th floor of a building where the elevator doesn't work.
Is this just happening because all major media outlets are either based in New York or have a substantial presence there, and thus have a harder time projecting their end-of-civilization fears onto the recovery effort?
18 The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.
I had someone undertake me on the hard shoulder on the M4 the other day
Surely if you were undertaken, you'd be dead.
19: I saw a few reports of looting but not the scare stories of Katrina. Rumors fill an info vacuum, there wasn't much coming directly from New Orleans for quite some time, was there?
The reason for the double line is to indicate that there is not enough visibility given the speed limit to complete a pass. If you're driving the speed limit, the same applies for pulling over to the shoulder- you have a chance of running into something you can't see far enough in advance before the car has finished passing you.
This is not quite correct, although one does still need to exercise discretion. If you're passing in oncoming traffic, it's doubly hard to gauge visibility because:
a) you're exceeding the speed limit, and
b) someone is barreling towards you.
If you're driving on the shoulder, then
a) you drop down and go slower, or as slow as you'd like to go, and you can happily slow to a stop if you'd like, and
b) any obstacles are stationary.
Sure, don't drive on the shoulder on a blind curve, but there are plenty of times when driving on the shoulder is safe but passing in the oncoming traffic lane is not.
The shoulder allow passing works better than I would have expected in Texas in part because most rural highways tend to be over-engineered with wide shoulders (also things like turning lanes when two remote Farm-to-Market roads intersect).
someone is barreling towards you
Someone is barreling toward the person that is passing me. I'm more than happy to regard that as their problem, not mine.
re: 24
Yeah, in the case of the Greek major roads I was on, the hard shoulder was basically a full extra lane, albeit with more pebbles and dirt, and occasionally crumbling on the outer edge. Drifting half way into it in order to let the person overtake without pulling completely into the opposite lane was a bit unnatural feeling, but it wasn't a big deal on the straighter sections as you could clearly see what was in the shoulder area. Coming round a corner only to find someone stopped on that shoulder, however, would have been a bit disastrous.
25: right until one or the other of them turn into your path.
In the Philippines, oncoming traffic was using our shoulder as a third lane (oncoming lane, oncoming shoulder, our-direction shoulder). So, no passing for us.
27: Then I'll be happy to go into the shoulder.
Pulling in to the shoulder is fairly common in Ireland, as we have a lot of roads with decent stretches of hard shoulder but no good spots to pass out. Big lorries will often do this to let drivers pass and it's considered good manners to briefly flash your lights (turn on hazards for a second or two) in acknowledgement after you go past. No one does it unless they can see ahead that there are no obstacles etc.
31: pulling over to the shoulder without changing speed?
Passing on the shoulder is SOP in rural NJ, as is using the shoulder as an extra lane in bad traffic.
10: On the drive to my grandfather's family's house in upstate NY, there were certain one-lane areas where if you met a car coming the other way, one of you had to back up to a spot wide enough for 2 cars. (This was true at least as of the 1980's.)
Not sure why 34 is directed to 10 in particular.
I remember roads like that when I went to see Mount St. Helens back in the day. Nobody was going very fast either way.
Living where I do it's easy to forget that any other part of TX exists.
And where is that?
31: yes, if the lorry is trundling along at a moderate speed and the car driver would clearly like to pass. Often it's as much about lack of visibility when stuck behind a huge artic' as anything. Tractors etc will often stay the whole time on the hard shoulder or half in it. Slow drivers of ordinary cars are the least common category of performers of this action but still quite a few do so.
I thought that the standard procedure in Texas was to pass on the shoulder while holding down your horn, and then swerve back and forth while randomly tapping your breaks, after you've passed.
I have literally never had anything like that happen to me in any other state, but at least once every few months, someone becomes completely enraged at the fact that I only drive 5-10 mph above the speed limit. Usually, it's someone driving a truck that's bigger than any truck I've seen outside of Texas.*
* not including semis
I wonder how much of it is just a race thing. Texas is also the only state where I've had people roll down their window to spit at me at stoplights (which doesn't work, BTW -- it's really hard to spit that far with enough accuracy to hit an open window) and yell racist remarks at me, as well as the only state where I've been told to "get out of here, you damn foreigner".
I didn't realize how much that sort of thing bothered me until I started interviewing recently. When I really think about it, I don't want any of the Texas jobs I'm interviewing for because I don't want to have this constant low level stress in my life. I didn't even know anti-Asian racism existed (in this century) until I moved to Texas.
Here people spit only on cyclists and race doesn't matter.
That sucks, sral. Don't go anywhere they don't treat you right. There are lots of places where strangers will mostly ignore you in a civil way.
Oh god, sral, I'm horrified and embarrassed that you get that sort of treatment in this (admittedly shitty) state.
My driving teacher told a story of a vacationing couple who passed a pickup truck on the interstate. The truck sped up and drew even with them, and then the driver shot one of them in the face. (I think it was supposed to have been in some non-Texas western state, though.)
My learning experience with out of state driving was in the HOV lanes around LA- apparently since the HOV lanes are to the left of the regular lanes, you must be moving faster than the left-most regular lane or you're some kind of asshole.
44: "Don't forget that there are a lot of people out there who think that Easy Rider had a happy ending". - Bill Bryson
"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown!" doesn't seem that happy.
45: the only reason in LA to let another person in your car is to use the HOV lanes so you can go faster than other traffic.
Thanks, heebie and Megan. And, umm, Moby.
I also wonder how much of it is not because I'm in Texas, but because of the rise of China. People never yell the correct racial epithets, because they can't tell that I'm not Chinese, and anti-Chinese sentiment is relatively high right now. I bet I would have received anti-Japanese insults in the 80s, had I been old enough, even though I don't look Japanese in any way whatsoever.
Then again, I don't hear about black and Asian students getting doused with bleach in other states, so it's probably at least partially a southern thing. I suppose I'll find out how much of it is Texas specific after I move.
Texas is also the only state where I've had people roll down their window to spit at me at stoplights . . . and yell racist remarks at me, as well as the only state where I've been told to "get out of here, you damn foreigner".
Maybe you just haven't given the other states a chance. I'm sure there are some sections of, say, Idaho and South Carolina that might oblige.
But Megan is right. I hope you can get a job somewhere you're subjected to the same discourtesies as everyone else.
I don't hear about black and Asian students getting doused with bleach in other states,
Holy shit! Is this a thing? Now?
Googles.
Bleach balloons. Jesus.
Sral: just to hit on what hebbie and Megan said, I'm sorry you've had such a shit experience in Texas. There are a lot of racist, homophobic fuckwits there--hence the "extexan" part. And if you don't have to stay, gtfo. Life's too short to spend your days dealing with assholes.
I just got back from Texas! It was my first time there. I loved it so, so much.
(Sral, that sounds truly lousy, and I'm sorry to hear it. The only time that I've experienced truly relentless racism (e.g., people yelling epithets, throwing garbage, motels refusing rooms, etc.) was in a trip I took to Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas, but it was so awful that I decided not to venture out of the Pacific coastal states or the Northeast for the next twenty years.)
Sral: I'm sorry you've had to deal with that. Like others, I'm also pretty shocked at the bleach thing. Sadly, epithets aren't so shocking. I think you're probably right about China being a factor.
I've considered applying for a couple of jobs in Texas, and while I haven't ruled out the state altogether, I find myself looking up locations and asking, "How bad could it be there?"
48: Well, I understand that idea when there's traffic in the standard lanes and you get to zoom along in the HOV. But this was a case of no congestion in the regular lanes, so the left lane was already going about 75, and my CA native passenger said I had to make sure I was matching that speed or people in the HOV lane would be mad.
40, 54: Good lord. I hate realizing that I'm living in a fantasy world about how racism of the kind that expresses itself as aggression aimed at strangers is mostly a thing of the past. That's awful.
Texas is the most populous state I've never been to. Ok, it's ranked #2 so that's not saying much- I've been to the 21 most populous states except for Texas. I see no reason to change this situation.
56: people will get sort of mad at you if you're going less than 75 in any lane on the freeway in California. That's the de facto speed limit. It's just that in the HOV lane they can't pass you.
I went to an airport in Texas once. Nobody spit on me, but I'm white.
In Seattle (or maybe Portland?) there was a section on I-5 where the left lane just turned into the HOV lane with about a half-mile warning. At the time I went through - before I knew to keep out of that lane - traffic was already heavy and then there was a big traffic jam caused by people, like me, having to flee that lane.
I swear down around San Diego there are some sections of freeway on the way out via I-15 so wide that the HOV lanes have HOV lanes. It's like the ultimate in exurban freeway dystopia.
But they could probably tell you were some sort of hippie so you were lucky to escape.
61.last: there's one part of the 5/805 interchange that's something like thirty lanes wide.
people will get sort of mad at you if you're going less than 75 in any lane on the freeway in California
I don't know if fuel costs are leading people to drive more slowly, but that's not quite true anymore, at least in my experience. The left 2 lanes (not counting HOV and assuming a 3+ lane section of freeway) still see a lot of this, with people darting around anyway they can get by, but the right lanes are routinely and sometimes annoyingly* at about the speed limit or slower.
*Ok, by admitting to getting annoyed, I could be disproving my point here. But I generally don't take the dart around driving approach.
I can't say that my Texas airport experiences have really stood out as better or worse than other airport experiences. My worst one was in Minneapolis just because of the boredom: four hour layover, not willing to pay for wifi, carrying enough electronics that I didn't feel comfortable sleeping, air conditioning just high enough that I got uncomfortably chilly just sitting still, and at least 2 Fox News stores.
People never yell the correct racial epithets, because they can't tell that I'm not Chinese, and anti-Chinese sentiment is relatively high right now. I bet I would have received anti-Japanese insults in the 80s, had I been old enough, even though I don't look Japanese in any way whatsoever.
I think the weirdest example of this for me was when I was in a cafe in Connecticut and some guy started to aggressively hassle me about the Vietnam War, to which I was like dude, I wasn't even born yet. (It was just one guy, and an obviously not-quite-right one at that, but still, there were other people around, and they just watched him yell at me.)
Huh, I went through there (on the same trip where I went up I-15) when traffic was so heavy I didn't even notice all the lanes. There was almost no traffic when I left a few days later on a Saturday so I got a better look at the layout of the interchanges.
57, etc.: I don't want to overstate the problem. Austin's a nice place, overall, and I could probably almost entirely avoid the issue* if I never visited west campus, or any of the gentrifying neighborhoods that are full of old white folks who have been there forever, who are getting pushed out by young white, Asian, and Indian folks. But, a lot of the foodie-hipster restaurants that I like are in those neighborhoods. And the Fed is in west campus, kinda sorta.
* or, at least all of the explicit racism.
sral, I'm also sorry that's happening to you. (Or STILL happening, as you've mentioned it before, I think.) I don't think it's overstating the problem to say that you could stay away from racists but it would mean curtailing your own pleasurable activities. The problem is that you can't move freely without threat of harassment, and that's a totally legitimate problem!
I went to an airport in Texas once.
The airport with a statue of Bush senior gallantly running, with flung briefcase and necktie breezing in the wind, presumably because he's late for a flight?
As near as I can tell, the Memphis airport exists to sell barbeque and merely lets planes land because they realized the parking lot was bigger than they needed.
72 to random brain waves triggered with very little reason.
I was in Texas for work, for a couple of days at the end of August. It was surprisingly okay, but I didn't really interact with anybody except the people I was working with, the hotel & car rental people, and the waitress at the small Vietnamese restaurant that I ended up eating at three nights in a row.
It's also likely that my general dislike of travel outweighed any Texas-specific discomfort. I was just happy to get through the day and go back to my hotel and crash.
Sorry to hear about that Sral. I like Texas a lot, and have spent a lot of time there (not in Austin) but it really is very very noticeably more racist than here. Sometimes just in a kind of ignorant/joking way about "weird" Asian food or whatever, but I've been around older people (50+) who were really happy to throw down with straight up anti-black stuff, usually said in a more in sorrow than in anger.
Then there's a senior lawyer at my old firm, who began his opening statement in a trial (in TX) against a Japanese company with something like "As the sun rises in the east . . ." which promptly provoked a (sustained) objection.
Did your senior lawyer actually have a racist intention to invoke the Japanese flag?
||
Overheard in Dulles: someone, being told someone else's plane was canceled: "well, there's a purpose and a reason!"
Arrrrrrgh.
|>
78: Actually, they're the same thing: because.
37: Oops, was away from the thread all day. Near a certain totalizing "traditional" state university, far from any hills.
it's really hard to spit that far with enough accuracy to hit an open window) and yell racist remarks at me, as well as the only state where I've been told to "get out of here, you damn foreigner".
I didn't realize how much that sort of thing bothered me until I started interviewing recently.
That does sound like a shitty interview.
77 -- not "racist" in the sense of "race hatred" but "racist" in the sense of "let's win the case by biasing the jury."
Hmmm. I don't think it's just a custom in Texas. I think you're legally supposed to. There is a law about that in Idaho. I think Texas as well.
84: In Texas it is explicitly allowed by law, but certainly not required.
Yes, clearly spitting on a person and deleting your pearls of wisdom from the comment threads are the same thing. How very sympathetic you are.
87 to Stormcrow. Yeah, Stormcrow.
56
48: Well, I understand that idea when there's traffic in the standard lanes and you get to zoom along in the HOV. But this was a case of no congestion in the regular lanes, so the left lane was already going about 75, and my CA native passenger said I had to make sure I was matching that speed or people in the HOV lane would be mad.
You would be slowing them down with no benefit to yourself. You don't have to drive in the HOV lane just because you are eligible.
88: Sure fine, whatever. But what I want to know is does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?