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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

> one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.

i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.

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Sounds like a derivative from a road style which has (mostly, thankfully) been abandoned: originally, “suicide lanes” designated the center lane of a 3-lane.

A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.

These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.

They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).

In Mexico there are still a good number of 3-lane roads where the middle lane is for passing in both directions. A close family friend died on one: head-on collision with a truck passing a truck on a curving mountain road. (He was an aggressive driver who got lucky for decades until one day he finally didn’t.) Truly horrible road design.

Middle shared turn lanes are quite safe though, though I don't have actual stats. It's very hard to hit someone in one because no one is driving more than 50 ft in one, and you're always coming to a stop to prepare for a turn. On busy streets they are usually a bit wider than a normal lane, and on 80 km/h highways, they are a full lane-and-a-half wide. On busier residential streets with lots of single family homes, they are a great alternative to two lanes in each direction, because they allow for separated bike lanes and left-turning cars don't block traffic flow. Many 50 km/h roads in my city have been converted like this.

You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.

I spent a summer in India in the late 1980s (Tamil Nadu). Going between cities, the roads were only partially paved. There were two dirt lanes, with a blacktop middle lane. The trucks would play a continuous game of "chicken", driving at each other until someone lost their nerve.

The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.

Likewise in Ontario. Strong term, but gets the point across. I also once saw a dump truck with stickers on either side of the tailgate. On the left, "passing side." On the right, "suicide." Had a big impact on my driving habits... I never, ever pass on the right.

Unfortunately the majority of people don't seem to understand they're not allowed to pass on the right (and they never get pulled over for it).

If slower traffic kept right, there’d be a lot less passing on the right. (If you’re getting passed on the right regularly, you might consider your own lane discipline as well as that of those passing you.)

Yes, this is also true, but I think the bigger problem is just speeding. People on the left are usually moving faster than people on the right or middle, on average, but some people want to go 20-30 mph over the speed limit. Normally I'd pull to the right so they can pass, but by the time I start doing that they're already starting to change lanes too!

True. If you take a highway that people feel is reasonable and prudent to drive at 75-85 mph and post it as 55, people will drive 20-30 mph over. I think the problem is more likely the 55 signage in that case.

That might make sense for dump trucks because they're bulky and have poor visibility, but what's the increased risk of passing on the right? The only thing I can think of is marginally worse visibility because the right side is slightly further away from the driver's seat. However, I don't think that's enough risk to justify going out of your way to pass on the right. Having to change lanes to pass on the left carries its own risks.

On a 3+ lane road, it increases the risk of two people merging into each other as they both try to pass.

Some cars have a blind spot on their right. Also, the convention is passing on the left, so people are generally less aware of things going on on their right. Of course bad drivers are almost by definition unpredictable, but if some bad driver is going to absent mindedly merge into you, they will probably do it while you are on their right. In particular, distracted people whose texting has been interrupted by their GPS telling them to take the next exit...

In many countries, it's a hard rule that you need to pass on the left. Passing on the right is only allowed when it's a lane going in a different direction (like an exit), or traffic is moving very slowly (you don't want people changing lanes in a traffic jam to avoid passing on the right).

Going onto the IdiotsInCars subreddit, it's kind of shocking how commonplace it is for people to undertake other road users by speeding past in the slow lane. It's already more difficult to merge back into a slower lane because you have a much bigger blind-spot (and have to twist your neck a lot more to get a good look), so it doesn't make it any easier if you have to expect that people will be speeding to undertake you.

While "keep right except to pass" is technically the law here in Ontario, the de facto standard is that the middle lane is the cruising lane, the left is the passing lane, and the right is basically a second merging lane. This means that it is not uncommon to have stop-and-go traffic in the left two lanes while the right lane is still moving and mostly wide open. Drivers will frequently move right into the middle lane from the ramp even with no traffic in the right lane and not having sped up to the highway speed. It's an complete waste of resources.

Highways are a complicated graph problem I guess, which I'm not very good at, but I wouldn't be surprised if the true bottleneck was some offramp later. So, increasing the throughput of the road leading up to it shouldn't really improve things, right? And leaving rightmost lane less heavily populated might make it easier for cars to do the off/on ramp thing which might make things easier around the bottleneck.

I dunno. People pack in as tightly as possible around here and we still get traffic. I think it is just inevitable.

I hate it when my GPS on my second phone does this!

On a serious note, the overtake left thing (or right for those strange people driving on the wrong side) is a big reason German Autobahn is as safe as it is. Reckless idiots notwithstanding.

I wonder how much that specific road design cause FedEx to discourage left hand turns in their routes?

I think you're thinking of UPS, and IIRC the decision is mostly to reduce waiting time/idle fuel burn. (Most jurisdictions in the US allow right-on-red and that makes this even easier to justify.)

If I go somewhere often, I like to find the "chill route" that minimizes complex left turns, even if it takes a bit longer.

Same, I don't even mind if it takes a bit longer. I am more interested in stress free driving than getting there sooner.

I've also called it that for as long as I can remember, and it's probably helped me drive more defensively around that lane. Drivers misuse it all the time.

The only other time I have heard that was during my driving test on small town California

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