People who drive large trucks
I’ve never been a fan of large automobiles on the road for anything but commercial use. I find that most people seem to buy them as some sort of personal tank. I guess they didn’t get the memo about large vehicles and their related problems: poor handling compared to cars, prone to flipping, eats way more gas, and costs you way more. Another problem is people who don’t know how to drive them. They seem to think that regular traffic laws don’t apply to them. Their size seems to grant them a large margin of poor driving; in their eyes only. With this in mind…
Imagine your driving on a boring Saskatchewan highway. Speed limit is 100km/h and you hit the largest cloud of fog ever seen in YEARS. Covering nearly 2/3’s of Saskatchewan from what I hear. So dense that you can maybe see 5 seconds ahead of you while traveling 100km/h. In ideal conditions, you need about 80m of stopping distance at that speed. Roads were a little wet and the fog has a nasty tendency to create a thin layer of ice crystals on the road. Google reveals that wet road conditions should have 128m or so. Now, assuming each car is traveling 100km/h, the distance between them when they first see each other is going to be twice distance to the point they meet at. 100km/h works out to ~28m/s, so at an average time to meet of 5 seconds… thats… 280m apart; or, 1/4 of a km. Seems like alot, but lets not forget… that if each car was on a collision course and just managed to see each other 280m apart, that leaves… 24m worth of margin for error in their stopping distances.
Moving on, I decided to travel the speed limit, even thought I knew I should of been traveling slower. My rational is that it’s far too dangerous to pass or be passed in this situation. In all likely hood people are gonna bunch up and hopefully travel until the fog breaks up. So, traveling at the speed limit would hopefully make those people who must speed at least moderately happy that they’re not going slower than the most they can go (does that make sense?) Anyways, my sister was pacing behind me as well… and cars just started to pile up. Most of them seemed happy to realize there was no hope in a safe pass and just spread out. Turns out a guy hauling a snow mobile in his giant truck was in a hell of a hurry, so he was slowly working his way up the ladder of cars. A few times most defiantly put himself in situations where people had to drive the shoulder on either side and slow down. He didn’t seem to care that he was putting himself, and at least two other vehicles in danger every time he did that. Eventually worked his way up behind me and of course passed. Just then a SEMI appears 5 seconds away… So the semi has to hit the breaks, I have to slow down. Everyone has to pull over… so this jack ass can zoom by into the fog.
This same thing happened again later on… with another truck in one hell of a hurry to haul that big pile of AIR in their box someplace. Meanwhile everyone else seemed perfectly content to relatively safely on the road. It boggles my mind how a person can justify taking actions that not only endanger themselves (which I’m all for, Darwinism at work folks); but, it’s another thing to endanger multiple different parties with your actions. I may be an ass hole, but I hope those idiots crash and burn.
