How would you rate a typical driver (from 1 to 10)

You have the right idea, but going with the flow makes maintaining a constant speed impossible; flow speed is rarely if ever constant for long.

If you're "running with the pack" the members are always following too closely and forced to brake fairly often. In truck driving they call that "letting the guy/s in front of you drive your truck".

Again, right idea, wrong application. Braking for the "next event" suggests you missed its development.

Habitual overuse of brakes can get a truck driver fired from a safety conscious company. It is evidence of too much speed, following too closely and failure to respond early enough to circumstances that merely lifting off the throttle sooner would have solved.

The best drivers consider braking on an interstate at all evidence of a serious error in judgment. For the terminally stupid that does not mean to suggest crashing is preferable to braking. -----

- gpsman

Help the flow, "rubber-banding" is your friend, especially when you can see that traffic is stop-and-go or speeding up and slowing down regularly. Helps traffic behind you from developing "braking waves."

nate

Huh? -----

- gpsman

Do they keep ranting on about their ability to teach their children how to drive - score=0

Do they come from the USA - score=0

Do they come from Californicate - score=-1

Add up the numbers to rate your ability as a driver.

Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year:

UK: 3.6 USA: 12.3

You might want to think about that when attempting to work out what a s*it driver looks like.

Imagine yourself connected to the car in front of you by a rubber band. When he accelerates, accelerate less hard and let him pull away. When he brakes, lift off or brake more lightly, and let yourself catch up a little. Smooths out the flow.

nate

An important thing is to do initially is to try and move off as soon as he does, and don't - as many drivers - wait several seconds. However, take care in case he stalls his engine, and you rear-end him!

Close. Rubberbanding is a description of the normal pattern of stop/ slow and go traffic.

But that's not bad for you.

The tactic consists of smoothing one's own pattern of rubberbanding by building following distance then reacting to traffic far ahead as it slows, before the motorist to your front has any idea he's going to have to lift off the throttle in 10 seconds.

Reacting to the vehicle immediately to your front as it slows isn't going to accomplish much if anything to reducing rubbberbanding.

To be fair, neither does doing it right. There's always a generous supply of knuckleheads measuring travel by motor vehicle in seconds and feet if not fractions thereof that think they're losing ground and throughput isn't being maximized if more than 1 car length is being allowed between vehicles, so they are going to endeavor to fix what isn't wrong by attempting to fight their way through what they see as a "phalanx of sloth" consisting of motorists who only took to the road to be in their way. ----

- gpsman

No way to compare the UK with the US. They do not travel anywhere near as many miles nor do they have close to the population.

You travel around double the average miles that we do. Stats show average over there is about 16,000 per year, here it's 8500 per year.

So, you travel less than double what we do, yet have almost 4 times the death rate.

Steve's s*it driver comment still stands.

Indeed. If you take Mr Arkin's previously expressed attitude that driving is some sort of right and that freedom should permit any old person to teach driving and any old person to get in a car and aim it at the horizon, it gives you a feel for *why* the USA is so poor.

All drivers in the USA think they have the god-given right to drive.

All drivers in the USA think that they can do all sorts of other things while they drive other than look where they are going.

Play with your phone, run your office from your car, drink buckets of coffee... behaviour that would see someone arrested or at least given a stiff talking to across Europe are ignored by the cops in the US simply to enforce harsh speed control. And outside of major cities people drive junkheaps that wouldn't pass an MoT here.

It's very easy to compare the two. On the same basis as comparing any pair of countries, deaths per 100,000/year or deaths per bn km. Whichever you choose, the USA is a motoring death trap. Their death rates are inferior to Italy, for example.

This is despite Italy having a widely ignored 130kph maximum and the USA having rigidly enforced low speed limits.

You might want to calculate the fatalities per mile, rather than per inhabitant. Americans drive a lot more. Bigger country, rail service that makes British Rail look good.

-- Patrick

They drive just under twice as much, and still have 4 times the fatalities, as has already been pointed out.

My experience driving over there leads me to believe Americans are not good drivers. That includes city driving, freeway driving and out in the wilds driving.

Maybe, but I am not yet convinced. What's the accident rate? British speeds are typically lower, so when they crash, then get owies instead of dead.

-- Patrick

a) Why don't you use google and work it out. The accident rate has already been posted. You can easily find out the average mileage per person in the USA is around 16,000 and 8700 pp in the UK.

b) Average speeds lower in the UK? Don't make me laugh. Like I said, I've driven plenty over there. The Americans drive like they are on Mogadon compared to our motorway (Freeway to you). Hell, there's a man in this thread complaining about getting a ticket for 70 in a 50. Last time I drove from Atlanta to Columbus (GA), I was in a hire (rental) car, my American passenger was extremely nervous of me getting stopped for speeding, and I was only doing 85. Not one car passed me in 100 miles down the I-85/I-185..

Then 10 must have represented "average". Old ladies and children with

Why? -----

- gpsman

Ah, the Kobayashi Maru. So you cheated.

jg