Joined: Aug 02, 2006
Posts: 604
Location: McLean, VA, USA
Posted:
Mon Oct 16, 2006 9:01 pm
This seems to be universal rule, and it worked for me all over the world, except for left side driving countries – but you just need to change left to right and vise versa for those ones. Its amazingly high accuracy started to diminish somewhat in D.C. area recently, but still stays high. There are exceptions to this rule, and if you drive daily somewhere, you know the prevailing traffic pattern for the time of the day. But if you are in an unfamiliar place, it is your best bet to follow this rule while in traffic jam or in heavy traffic.
It sounds pretty simple: right lane is the fastest.
Explanation is pretty easy: average drivers (which are the majority of drivers on the road) prefer to stay in the left lane(s).
We must have a lot of country bumpkins in Arizona our far left lanes are the quickest and our far right lane is for on-coming and off-going traffic which is the slowest in California I do have to agree with you when it comes to the right lane, it was lickity split on there. lololo
In the country i live always people tend to choose the right lane and obviously becomes the crowded lane. i always prefer the left lane to ride freely and safely.
It may not be so in Estonia, but road laws in NZ, which are based on those in Australia and the UK, say that people must indicate before entering a roundabout if they are turning. The law also says that people must indicate as they leave the roundabout, no matter if they have turned or not.
The professional term is that the right lane is the "lane of least ressistance."
This kind of observation is true in countries where keeping right isn't practiced so widely. It's a real shame. The lane choice has to do with the flow of traffic. When traffic keeps right, overtakes briefly from the left and quickly flushes back right, the traffic streams much better. In my country, people are not keen about keeping right, and the right lane is usually fastest. However, once a certain amount of cars are present on the road, traffic will congense and slow down.
However, in countries where people do keep right (Western Europe) traffic will flow at high speeds even when there are a lot of cars on the roads, where in my country (or in the US, for that matter) it would begin to congense and slow down.
But other than this functional and cultural advantage, the idea of keeping to the right is about SAFETY. In right-hand driving countries, where is the driver's seat? On the left! This means that you will have traffic passing you only to your left, rather than passing by you at both sides, or on the right where your awareness is reduced (because you have to look for the mirror all across the cabin).
In most cars, the left-wing mirror will also be bigger, to cover for the obstruction caused by the B pillar when drivers look over their shoulder. In some cars (of american make), the right mirror is made to enlarge the image ("Objects in the mirrors are closer than they appear") but this can cause problems in gauging the exact distance.
Furthermore, the road infrastructure is also made to suit this driving style, where in keeping right you have traffic to your left, with an immediate escape route to the right. In the first left lane (mistakenly called a "middle lane") you have traffic around you in all directions, and in the far-left lane there is often no shoulder or at least a very narrow one, and maybe even a risk of oncoming traffic.
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