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from the youtube-dashcam-accidents-guaranteed-for-years-to-com dept.
Sunday Times Driving reports under 50% of surveyed UK drivers know what a roundabout sign looks like, and only 68% knew what the speed bump sign means.
The survey was conducted by the Institute of Advanced Motorists, with 1,000 participants.
Only 32% of drivers knew you should allow at least a two-second time gap to the vehicle ahead when driving on a dry open road. It appears many motorists are conflating this with two car lengths in distance, as 53% of those surveyed responded with that answer.
[...] Younger motorists were the most likely to answer incorrectly, with 17 to 39 year-olds having the lowest correct answer percentage rates in 14 of the 23 questions, but older drivers didn't do very well either.
The Sunday Times article has an embedded googleforms survey, so you can test your knowledge of UK road rules.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 22 2018, @02:41PM (4 children)
And then you'll sit still as traffic flows around you and cuts in half a second ahead of you. People here drive 80mph with half a second following distance, and will cut in if you leave a second. This increases to about two seconds in a blizzard.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday October 22 2018, @03:23PM (3 children)
1) No, I don't.
2) Fuck 'em if they do. So long as I have my two seconds, I really don't care about them.
P.S. I drive a lot, I drive around London and European capitals (some of the worst!), I drove motorways and side roads. I don't have a problem. I assure you the roads are much worse than any US highway.
Mainly because you can't do 80mph (limit is 70mph). Mainly because there are speed cameras everywhere (and people have learned that there's no point slamming your brakes on for every one as they are almost all "average" speed cameras nowadays). Mainly because when you do 70mph, the only idiots that don't know what's going on are middle-lane-hoggers who have a mile of empty road both in front of them, and in the lane they SHOULD be in anyway. Everyone else has a reasonable distance.
Hell, we even paint the suggested distance on the floor on some motorways - little chevrons every few hundred yards with signs saying to make sure you leave that much gap. Everyone (generally) does just that on those stretches and there's *no slowdown* when they do join or leave those parts with the painted chevrons. Everyone tends to have that kind of gap anyway.
You drive like an idiot "because everyone else does". See how far it gets you when you smash into someone. My 2 seconds is for me... cut into it and I hit you because of that and my insurance company will be having a word (with the aid of a dashcam). All the "tricks" that used to work to let you be a moron before we had dashcams don't work now that we have them.
And my local police force take dashcam footage and have been known to prosecute everything from badly-chosen overtaking spots to exactly this kind of cutting-in.
2 seconds is actually *nothing*. In a blizzard, you're a damn moron. If they cut in front of me, I'll brake to get my 2+ seconds back every time. Because 2 seconds is a tiny short amount of distance, and the absolute minimum.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 23 2018, @02:26PM
Yeah, as I said, do that here and you'll be sitting still. It simply doesn't work here. Try it and you're a damn moron.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25 2018, @10:59AM (1 child)
Are you sure you drive around London. Average speed check cameras aren't that common, and only feature on UK motorways where there are roadworks. And very few drivers in the UK leave a 2 second gap. Distance keeping does tend to improve where the chevons are painted on the motorways, but I still always see some drivers ignoring them. Although the speed limit on motorways is 70mph people frequently go faster, drivers going 80mph isn't uncommon, I even see drivers going 100+mph every now and then. Speed cameras on motorways aren't that frequent and fairly easy to spot given that they are painted bright yellow.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday October 25 2018, @11:46AM
You do know the west side of the M25 is an average speed check road? Plus almost the entirety of the South / South West M25 from the Dartford Tunnel onwards round to Gatwick. And things like the M3 are covered in spot-check cameras bolted to the uprights of the signs and walkways? All kinds of average speed cameras, outside of any roadworks, and literally THOUSANDS of spot-check cameras. Even the websites that list them don't have even half of them, and my CoPilot app has some stupendous number of cameras listed and still isn't up-to-date with what's actually on the road.
I've lived in (Greater) London all my life. The majority of drivers are actually not too bad on the motorways. Compared to Europe (with the exception of Germany, where people are ultra careful on motorways), we're positively amazing. But circle the M25 once - what's that? 100 miles? and I guarantee you'll hit all kinds of average camera tracts and dozens if not hundreds of speed cameras - at least 25% of your journey around, if not more is average-camerad. Of course people do stupid things - now watch the speeds between the M5 and M3... where everyone does 70 exactly on the cruise control because they know what's there. What UK drivers do not understand is lanes on motorways, but you don't tend to get stupendous speed-nutters any more because of this stuff.
The beauty of the average camera - they only need to see you at ANY TWO POINTS to get you for consistent speeding. Those two points could be on different roads entirely, 100 miles apart, or on adjacent street poles.
Modern ones don't even flash, aren't that visible (little very-rectangular box on the motorway signs for the M3, for instance), and don't really care what speed you hit *them* at, so much as the time between them and the last camera you flagged on.