This one’s in part for the drivers of four-wheeled vehicles, excepting perhaps any non-dually hotshots, in the audience.
“Mr. Roadshow” Gary Richards of California Bay Area newspaper The Mercury News authors a Q&A-style column related to on-road questions for readers. He’s made the halls of this blog before, though it’s been nearly a decade, with a story about “foggy” (not “fatigued” but fog of the “pea soup” variety) driving.
His Nov. 28 installment of the column, in which he seemed to give the big 10-4 to the appropriateness of flashing brights as a tractor-trailer passes to signal there’s space for a safe merge, brought the ire of plenty in the trucking community among his readers. Drivers responded in droves to Richards’ “Flashing your lights can help passing truckers,” many of course quick to note that a flash of the lights off and back on, or vice versa as the case may be, is the appropriate space-signaling protocol — not bright lights — and particularly at night.
As hauler Fred Goodwin put it: “Flashing high beams, especially at night, blinds the trucker by interfering with night vision. Whoever started this … flashing high beams needs to be drawn and quartered.”
Duly, Mr. Roadshow followed up to correct the record, or at least get these viewpoints on bright-light flashes into the discussion. Find the follow-up via this link.
A-and as long as you’re here, my fellow motorists, our own Gary Buchs, too, has a particular recommendation on a way we can help each other manage the more impatient among us out on the roadway. If there’s anything that pretty much all truckers can agree on, it’s that what I’ll call the “highway-speed cutoff” is an infuriating, and generally speaking unsafe, practice.
What does that mean? Merging too quickly in front of a tractor-trailer when you’re passing it at highway speed. It probably goes without saying, but an 80,000-lb. combination rig takes much longer to stop than does your four-door. Depending on speed, weight of the truck and brake performance, it can take one to two football fields of length (360-720 feet, including end zones) or well more to bring a truck to a controlled stop.
