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Old 29-05-10, 06:50 AM   #31
MattCollins
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Originally Posted by 2hys View Post
i was on the m26 (a two lane motorway) on wednesday in my lorry doing 56 mph the lorry in front was going slightly slower, i decided to overtake as i could not see any cars in my rear view mirror, i must have taken 2 or 3 minutes to overtake him but in that time a que of cars had formed behined me! i pulled back in, the first car to pass was french, (driver on the left) no reaction... then came the toyota hi lux 4x4 with fists waving and rude hand gestors.. the third car an un marked police ford focus... now with blue and twos, the copper in the passanger seat smiled at me as they passed then pulled the 4x4 over.. made my day that did
That got a chuckle. Had something similar happen years ago in the truck and it was a 4x4 Hilux. The difference was he swerved at me, my reaction was "you've got to be kidding me"... 3 trailers and 100t... Next car through were unmarked cops who promptly pulled him. Sometimes there is justice in this world.

I am not too shy about flicking someone the bird and telling them to nick off when they are climbing all over the back off me, but if they want to get into cutting in on me or brake slamming, I'll have nothing to do with it. They have already given me all I need for a little satisfaction. It has all been recorded.

Last edited by MattCollins; 29-05-10 at 06:52 AM.
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Old 29-05-10, 07:06 AM   #32
cb1000rsteve
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Had a not so nice experience with a white van man yesterday. I was doing 30mph in the wifes Zafira with the little one on board and i couldn't see his front number plate he was so close. So i jumped on the brakes. He decided to follow me home but didn't turn into my last turn as it states its a dead end on the sign. He obviously bottled it. I was proper worked up by then though. Had the adrenalin shakes LOL. I do tend to get worked up about bad driving that concerns me as i tend to drive slow and careful (replace with granny) when transpoting my precious cargo.
in the Op's situation i'd just of ignored it. You see it all the time. If you never flicked V's etc he would of carried on in his own little world. Peopel will always rush. It just puts a smile on my face when down the road you see the idiot parked in a wall etc.
I was in the works 4x4 when we had all the snow. Some idiot overtook me in a Focus. 2 roundabouts on he was in a ditch. He was waving for me to stop so i did just incase. He asked if i could tow him out. I said no as i was on a call out (lied) and then questioned his driving ability and why he thought a family focus could drive quicker and safer on snow than a 4x4??? Numpty
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Old 29-05-10, 09:34 AM   #33
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Only got as far as the second line of your post. Why did you jump on the brakes? Seems a silly thing to do - about as idiotic as the idiot behind you. No sympathy.
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Old 29-05-10, 10:06 AM   #34
-Ralph-
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Default Re: What would you do if

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Originally Posted by 2hys View Post
i was on the m26 (a two lane motorway) on wednesday in my lorry doing 56 mph the lorry in front was going slightly slower, i decided to overtake as i could not see any cars in my rear view mirror, i must have taken 2 or 3 minutes to overtake him but in that time a que of cars had formed behined me! i pulled back in, the first car to pass was french, (driver on the left) no reaction... then came the toyota hi lux 4x4 with fists waving and rude hand gestors.. the third car an un marked police ford focus... now with blue and twos, the copper in the passanger seat smiled at me as they passed then pulled the 4x4 over.. made my day that did
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Originally Posted by MattCollins View Post
That got a chuckle. Had something similar happen years ago in the truck and it was a 4x4 Hilux.
You don't overtake on dual carriageway sections of A roads though do you though? When a queue of cars has been waiting patiently behind you for 10 miles on a single carriageway, which then takes you the whole length of the dual carriageway, and at the end of it you are in front of the other truck going 1mph faster, whilst the queue of cars are now stuck behind him for the next 10 miles.

I'm kidding, but in all seriousness, whilst you two may be one of the good guys when it comes to truckers (and Matt I don't know how applicable this is down under, it's based on what happens on here with a lot of 56mph restricted trucks on the road), it is easy to understand why people get p'eed off on two lane roads, when a truck takes a few minutes to get past.

Let's do the maths, 56mph is 25 metres per second. If it took you 3 minutes to gain lets say 30 metres on the other truck. You were going 10 metres per minute faster than him. So you were going about 0.37 mph faster. So over a 3 hour non stop journey overtaking that other truck will get you just over a mile ahead, or under 2 minutes difference in your arrival time. If you were both doing the same journey, and you overtook right at the beginning after joining the motorway, and you got caught at a red traffic light between the motorway and your destination depot for two minutes, the other truck would catch you, and you'd arrive together.

I'm not having a personal go at you mate, believe me I'm really not. I have done Birmingham to Scotland and back in a 56mph 7.5 tonner just recently, it bored and frustrated the hell out of me. I'll be doing Leeds to Ashbourne in a few weeks for a female friend who does not have the confidence to rent and drive something that size, and I'll be moving house myself again in a couple of months time. I can count the number of times I've driven a truck on one hand, but I'm not totally oblivious to the concept.

I just think that if more truckers were exposed to these kind of mathematics they'd overtake each other less, because especially on a dual carriageway or two lane motorway it does **** people off.

Now this post isn't going to stop all that, and doesn't excuse the guy in the Hilux, the police were right to pull him. Car and van drivers have to accept that trucks will overtake each other, probably because the driver doesn't understand those mathematics and how futile an exercise it really is, so people need to calm themselves and be patient. Waving fists at you won't help.

I fully sympathise when you come across Luton boxes fighting wind resistance and a hill at 45mph using an engine that wasn't powerful enough in a normal van, or when you get grannies doing 45mph in their VW Polo, but to me the police should be stopping them, and telling them to take an alternative A road route.

There was a journey time study done on the M42/A42, a two lane motorway from Tamworth up towards East Midlands airport, where trucks weren't allowed in lane 1, made a huge difference to the average journey time on that stretch of road.

If there is less than 2 mph difference between you and the truck in front, just back off a bit and follow behind him if you are on a two lane road.

Last edited by -Ralph-; 29-05-10 at 10:19 AM.
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Old 29-05-10, 12:22 PM   #35
MattCollins
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Ralph,

The trucks are entitled to be on the road as much as you are. To have it differently is discriminating against another road user and one that keeps your supermarket and bike shop shelves stocked I might add. I don't think that you really want to go down that road.

Seeing as you're into calculations here's one for you based on the higher speed limit (106kph on the governor) and longer length of trucks. 52m truck overtaking another of equal length. I need 4kph (say 1m/s) over the other guy to get past reasonably, starting from 20m behind and the length of my vehicle for safe merge distance (unless the other guy indicates otherwise). I am hanging out there for ~2min and will travel 3.5km. The guy behind me, getting all flustered because he has been held up has lost... wait for it...132m and a total of 4.4s of his life if he had been travelling at a legal speed. You'd loose about 24s of your life on a worst case legal speed, but I reckon it'd be less than half of that on average.
Another calculation - 10mi down a motorway at 60mph = 10min. Same 10mi at 50mph = 12min. Hardly worth getting upset over.

Trucks are the least of my problems on the road. I have had near misses with trucks, but they are the best of all road users. I am usually yacking with them on UHF40 as I approach them and they'll give me the go ahead when it is clear to go, I'll have a peek and go and maybe pass slow to give him a tyre check on the way through. As a rule they are a professional lot - the industry has weeded out most of the cowboys.

BTW, I am not a truck driver. I did a year behind the wheel in the early '90's clocking up 3000 hours and since then average about 50hrs pa. No time to get bored keeping the behemoth on the road.

Last edited by MattCollins; 29-05-10 at 12:34 PM.
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Old 29-05-10, 01:00 PM   #36
-Ralph-
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Ralph,

The trucks are entitled to be on the road as much as you are. To have it differently is discriminating against another road user and one that keeps your supermarket and bike shop shelves stocked I might add. I don't think that you really want to go down that road.

Seeing as you're into calculations here's one for you based on the higher speed limit (106kph on the governor) and longer length of trucks. 52m truck overtaking another of equal length. I need 4kph (say 1m/s) over the other guy to get past reasonably, starting from 20m behind and the length of my vehicle for safe merge distance (unless the other guy indicates otherwise). I am hanging out there for ~2min and will travel 3.5km. The guy behind me, getting all flustered because he has been held up has lost... wait for it...132m and a total of 4.4s of his life if he had been travelling at a legal speed. You'd loose about 24s of your life on a worst case legal speed, but I reckon it'd be less than half of that on average.
Another calculation - 10mi down a motorway at 60mph = 10min. Same 10mi at 50mph = 12min. Hardly worth getting upset over.
Nobody suggested I got upset over it, nor did I discriminate against anybody. It never ceases to amaze me how people can interpret things, when they don't like what it is they are reading. I'm just saying that you can see why people might get upset over it. I have no issue with trucks on the road and I have no issue with trucks overtaking, if that overtake is worth doing for the driver, ie: it'll save him 10 minutes not one or two.

The difference between my calculations and yours is that for the restricted truck the time it takes for the journey is pretty much fixed, so long as the road is flowing well at above the trucks restricted speed and being able to go 1/2 a mph faster because your overtaking every other truck in your way only gains you minutes.

However in your calculations youve just concluded correctly that the same over take held up the drivers behind by about 1/2 minute if he was doing the speed limit. The difference is for the driver behind his journey time is not just impacted by one overtake. If he comes across 30 such overtaking trucks in his journey, as you could quite easily on a lot of the longer stretches of two lane motorway, it's no longer a 1/2 minute delay, it adds up into a 15 minute delay. That's assuming that he can get straight back up to the speed limit and stay there, but the overtaking trucks create congestion for a mile behind them during a 3 minute overtake, and a miles worth queue of cars, never gets back up to much more than 5 mph more than the speed of the restricted truck, before the next one pulls out. So the reality is it can lower your average speed altogether and costs lots of drivers much more than 15 minutes, in order to save one truck driver, less than two minutes. This is further illustrated by your calculation of 2 mins per 10 miles, lets go back to our 3 hour journey to keep the maths simple, usually that's about 150 miles in the UK for a car driver. Reducing the flow speed of a motorway by 10mph has cost every driver 30 minutes!

I will reiterate what I put in my original post, I HAVE NO ISSUE WITH TRUCKS OR TRUCK DRIVERS. I HAVE NO ISSUE WITH TRUCKS TAKING 30 OR 40 SECONDS TO OVERTAKE EACH OTHER. I have an issue with trucks taking 3 minutes to overtake each other, put a hill into that three minutes and it's not unusual to find one idiot taking 10 minutes, because he won't give up. It has a major impact on motorway flow, extends journey times for everyone on that motorway, but provides a completely futile gain for one truck driver. It's not very fair is it!

Last edited by -Ralph-; 29-05-10 at 01:10 PM.
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Old 29-05-10, 01:13 PM   #37
cb1000rsteve
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Why did you jump on the brakes?
wrong choice of words on my part. Should of put 'pressed the pedal to illuminate lights'. In a vain attempt to get mister white van man off my rear bumper. Still he showed his true colours when he might of had to get out of the security of his cab to debate his and my driving.
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Old 29-05-10, 01:16 PM   #38
MattCollins
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Ralph, back up a bit, you have read way to much into my comments. Although I can see how it happened (my bad), I wasn't insinuating anything. None of it was meant to be aimed at you the way you think.

BTW, there is a solution if it is all so bad. Raise the limit on trucks to 65mph.

Last edited by MattCollins; 29-05-10 at 01:40 PM.
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Old 29-05-10, 01:17 PM   #39
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Why did you jump on the brakes?
wrong choice of words on my part. Should of put 'pressed the pedal to illuminate lights'. In a vain attempt to get mister white van man off my rear bumper. Still he showed his true colours when he might of had to get out of the security of his cab to debate his and my driving.
Aha, that's better. Back with it now.

Last edited by MattCollins; 29-05-10 at 01:27 PM.
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Old 29-05-10, 01:22 PM   #40
cb1000rsteve
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It just infuriates me when people tail gate. got in trouble with the police a few years back for grabbing a kid out of his supped up saxo for doing it to r lass. Unfortunately for me a copper was 3 cars back. Got off with a caution plus the bobby had a word with the yoof. i wasn't gonna hit him just shake and shout at him to see if any sense would go in. i've calmed down a lot since then but i still find it hard not to react.
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