If you were to follow that truck for all 1300 miles of 395 you would get to your destination 3 hours later than if you were going 70mph the whole way.
I would doubt that anyone would want to drive for nearly 19 hours straight, unless you're doing some sort of cannonball run like challenge.
If your destination is a mere 120 miles away, and you followed him the whole way you'd get there only 18 minutes faster. Was it really that important to get there that much faster?
The answer may be contingent on how many tacos you ate before this hypothetical trip.
Actually yes. That truck that's going 60 on the flats is going to be doing much less than that on the hills. Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.
Keep in mind that 3 hours @ 60 mph is 3 hours with another car on the road. To compensate you'd need another lane for 180 miles, not cheap. Also the rush of passing when a truck slows down is avoided. Additionally it's safer to pass when the speed differences are lower.
Seems better for everyone involved to let cars pass. It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
By that logic, that the time vehicles are on the road are necessarily limiting capacity of the system, then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?
I mean, it's only 3 times the kinetic energy (over 70mph), so any crash would be that much more dangerous/deadly. It's also very wasteful with respect to fuel, so you'd need to stop more often which would decrease your average speed.
Regardless, all of you all drive way too fast as is. It's not safe, it's not efficient.
Sure, but not 100%.
I'm not arguing that speed limits are useless. Just that the speed limits have always been for steady state driving. You can drive all day at them and never get a speeding ticket. However in the interest of safety you should be able to exceed them to pass, this gets the pass over more quickly and is safer and less frustrating for everyone involved.
I mean, Poland has 90mph speed limit on motorways and yet it's still safer than US which generally has very low speed limits everywhere. The only reasonable conclusion is that safety isn't directly correlated to the speed limits but to the state of infrastructure, driver training and culture.
You'll often see heavy truck that's not only slow uphill but also slow downhill, in some cases even more so - because it can't afford to build up speed above what its breaks can handle.
And these passing lanes are _never_ in downhill direction.
How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.
> It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
Instead of having an ever growing queue of cars that try to pass on the hill, they pass before hand on the flats. So there's not mass chaos when 100 cars who have been trying at 10 mph under the speed limit for an hour all try to pass on the uphill, while the truck is slowing from 60-40.
> If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
Sure, some do that, it's the drivers choice. Personally if passing is allowed, I like to pass slower vehicles. My car accelerates quickly, so I like to pass quickly and spend the minimum amount of time in the oncoming traffic lane.
Just seems natural to let the cars get ahead whenever they can, after all the cars usually have a different speed limit than the trucks. Thus the carefully engineered lane markers, truck specific speed signs, and often passing lanes on the hills.
So for a fixed distance, the slower you go, the longer you are on the road, the more road capacity you consume.
Driving isn't some binary situation, you have to constantly predict erratic behavior and react to your surroundings.
I do - we used to not have real highways 10-20 years ago. And the main issue with not overtaking a car-truck that is going just 60 (in your case) is that sooner or later they will encounter someone going 40-50, and they may not be able to overtake. And because of that uou end up driving 40mph on a 70mph road for hours.
Between all the vehicles I've driven in my life I've accrued, got I hate that I know this number off the top of my head, around 350k miles.
So yeah, I do have experience with such roads.
Then you have no idea what the rest of us are talking about. Western roads are huge, and travel times are long. When you're driving the ~1000 miles between Denver and Los Angeles, 10 mph difference in speed can make your trip up to 2 hours longer. That's not insignificant, especially if you're trying to do it in a single day.
Also, you did not read my post. I specifically said that over the course of those long miles 10mph will cost you 2-3 hours. I literally said that in my post.
You also missed the part where I suggested that no one should be driving for 21 hours, let alone 18.
Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.
500+500 with two drivers.