Different local areas have different road rules and different unwritten rules in culture. Or maybe you just have a low bridge. What mistake do non-local drivers make in your area?
Not a mistake but etiquette. I spent some time in Jersey and New York and noticed it was not uncommon for a car in the left turn lane to gun it when the light turned green and impede oncoming traffic. Rarely do I see that in the midwest and when I do I call it as it is, the Jersey Pullout.
As a Dutchman I’m always amused by the fact that roundabouts are such an exotic concept to most Americans.
My small town growing up has a town square. It’s a giant roundabout with a park in the middle and stores on the outside perimeter. If you showed those people a roundabout, they would still lose their minds.
I used to live up near Lake Tahoe. I lost count of how many city folk would think all wheel drive would be enough and skipped chains/cables.
One of our favorite things was watching people pour hot coffee or water on their frozen windshield. Man that never stopped being hilarious to watch. They would often just stand there in disbelief after their windshield shattered lol.
Well, I tried looking up videos of this and found one more reason not to: someone brought a bucket of hot water to their car and slipped on the icy driveway, spilling it on their face.
The pink path is not for pedestrians. It’s for bicyclists.
And when driving, don’t quickly stop when you see cars in front of you driving slowly. Instead, gradually lessen your speed, that helps reduce traffic jams.
Very specific, but driving through Pike Place in Seattle. It’s technically a road, but it’ll take you half an hour to go two blocks.
Is it because of pedestrians, or just heavy car traffic?[edit: just read the road details, looks like it’s a one-way ‘living street’ with pedestrians, capped at 20 mph](just posting OSM link for anyone else like me avoiding Google) https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/13526138
Yeah, I used google for the street view. It’s usually a lot more crowded than pictured, and I’ve never seen those steel barriers put up in real life.
So it’s just a street with like 3000 tourists doing their thing and drivers who thought they’d get curbside parking stuck for 30-40 minutes trying to get through.
It’s not a street, it’s a coffee. Common mistake.
Southern Appalachians
The damn yankees don’t realize that snow is different here. We tend to get mixed precipitation more, and even when the roads are prepared for cold weather, or can get stymied by the way we melt and freeze over time.
Snow ain’t the same everywhere, and in this neck of the woods, it tends to hide shit you can’t plan for.
Los Angeles: confusing the local aggressive driving with just driving like an asshole.
Apparently the line on a roundabout is where the rear axle of the car is supposed to stop.
That the left lane is the fast lane in traffic. Nope. It’s for the people who want to go fast, but are nuts to butts in the mountain curves, so it ends up as a constant stop and go wave. I’ll chug along in the 80% less busy right lane and sneak in when the “fast” drivers hit the brakes in the next curve so I can pass the actual slow cars.
