Hacker News Reader

Comment by boxcardavin | Hacker News Reader

I drove into a dust storm in Central Washington in a rental Volvo several years back and autobraking saved me from rear ending a car. I made it out, but a huge pileup ended up happening just behind me. https://www.kiro7.com/news/massive-crash-closes-eastbound-i-...

View on HN

I've read about a couple of accidents like this, and I always wonder why people don't slow down or stop before they drive into dense dust or fog?

Maybe because of the worry of getting rear ended themselves? And I'm sure a lot of people do; but then those drivers don't make the news.

Slow down, put on the rear fog light. That's how you're supposed to handle it, but either people have never been taught to do it, or they've forgotten.

You can't do that. We do not have rear fogs lights in America.

Well, you should fix that, then. They're quite useful.

It's utterly impossible for us to change this. We didn't invent rear fog lights in America, so because of this it would be completely impossible for us to adopt them. We're only able to change the standards for our cars when we invent them first.

Rear fog light?

All cars sold in Europe must have at least a rear foglight to be road-legal. Imported models must have one retrofitted.

Sometimes, rules and regulations actually do improve things :)

It's because the purpose of slowing down is primarily in terms of safety margin: if something goes wrong, you give yourself time to safely stop. If the occurrence of low visibility is infrequent enough for people to not have experienced an accident, but frequent enough to have experienced it more than a few times, it quickly settles into a habitual "well, I've had no problems going 70 in 0-visibility fog the last dozen times, so it can't be as unsafe as I'm told." What makes it more annoying is that actually driving a safe speed is also immensely unsafe, because the other cars are going 70 and can't see the car going 25 until it's too late.

One of the most unnerving drives I had to do was traveling on the Ohio Turnpike in super-dense fog. The traffic was heavy but moving more or less at speed. Cue the toll plaza... and the need to reform two lanes of traffic, with slowly accelerating truck traffic, cars whizzing from the right to pass the accelerating trucks, all in dense fog with almost no visibility (I don't think you could see the rightmost toll lane from the leftmost). And one idiot didn't have his lights on.

Final safety tip: if you can't see the road very well, turn your lights on. Even if they don't help you see the road (which they don't in fog), they absolutely help everybody else see you.

Probably arrogance. It's been many years since I've driven through fog thick enough to truly limit visibility, so light fog I might only drop my speed by 5-10MPH. Taillights are still visible at a safe distance in light fog. I can just about remember how easily they disappear (almost evaporate) into nothing in thick fog. Assuming the fog isn't that thick and driving through with excessive speed, it's astonishing how quickly the car in front with rear lights on full can appear out of nowhere.

A combination of wanting to get to your destination on time, inexperience and overconfidence are probably the key reasons.

Example - you're driving at 4am on an empty road with patches of heavy fog - so most of the time you can maintain the legal 70-80mph with good visibility, but then there are bit where the fog gets heavier for half a mile or so. So you slow down the first few times, but as there is no traffic at this hour, you just don't after the first dozen times or so, it's annoying and boring to be slowing down constantly. At then accidents happen because the 13th time there is something on the road.

Not directly related to your comment, but I was driving downhill a few months back when some halfwit came the other way in a car that clearly wasn't roadworthy. Must have been leaking a huge amount of coolant into the oil, because the cloud of steam (or smoke) behind it was so thick that half a dozen cars ended up just parked in the middle of the road, waiting for it to clear before moving off.

Turned my lights on to avoid being hit, seemed to work - or maybe I was just surrounded by cautious drivers that day.

People tend to underestimate the real speed. After driving for long time at 60mph, slowing down to 25mph feels like crawling while it's actually still pretty fast.

Seems very common in the US to just keep going at considerable speed with even limited visibility.

And admit that I can't see???

Reply on news.ycombinator.com