Friday, January 18, 2013

Snow fun driving in this weather

At the moment it's not really too bad, the main roads are clearish, but with all the heavy traffic around a lot of it's turned to slush which is slippery. Not good when you need to drive up and down multiple slopes.  Combine that with the poor road conditions and oddly enough I tend to slow down and keep my distance from the vehicle in front.

Seems I'm the only one doing that. I watch strings of traffic in front of me nose to tail pulling away from me. I watch the traffic behind catching up. No I'm not driving along at 5mph it's not that bad; but I am driving around 20mph which is only 10mph under the limit. Yet despite the weather conditions it seems some people think they should still be able to drive at the full speed dictated by the limit. After all it's a posted 30mph limit so that's what you should be doing! Well no.

The limit is the maximum speed you can travel at if conditions are ideal. In other words when the road is dry with clear visibility. A slush covered road while snowing does not constitute ideal conditions so no-one should be driving at the maximum limit. Yet they do. Why?

When taught to drive we're all taught this and there are multiple pleas to "take care" if out on the roads in these conditions; yet somehow some people think that just doesn't apply to them. I honestly don't understand it. Do we just have that many bad drivers on the road that they skew the average statistics? Are they just long-term drivers operating on muscle memory and simply not paying that much attention to what they're doing (i.e. they're so used to driving at 30 they just do so regardless)?

I wonder how many accidents will be caused today by people simply travelling at a speed not suited for these conditions? How many of them will be genuinely puzzled about why this accident happened?

0 comments: