Tag: skid marks

Late Lane-Changes to Exit from Highways are Dangerous!

Sadly, it is very common here in the  N.E. USA, to see selfish drivers deliberately stay out in the middle- or left-lanes of a highway until they are alongside the exit they require then veer or even swerve sharply  across the right-hand lane(s) to exit, right across the front of vehicles being driven correctly and safely.

Exit 28A on I-95, Massachusetts, showing at least three separate skid marks, almost certainly caused by a driver staying to the left, all the way to the exit, then swerving right to leave, or by drivers who were so distracted they nearly missed the exit, even from the right-hand lane. Terrible driving!

It is extremely obvious that this is not usually due to a driver reaching his/her required exit without realizing it — which, in itself, is very bad driving — but rather it’s a case of them deliberately staying in what they perceive to be the faster lanes until the last possible moment, in order to save a few seconds from their journey time.

Exit 32 on I-95, Massachusetts, showing at least seven separate skid marks, almost certainly caused by drivers who stayed to the left, all the way to the exit, then swerved right to leave, or by drivers who were so distracted they nearly missed the exit, even from the right-hand lane. Dreadful driving!

Photographs on this page clearly depict the aftermath of such blindingly stupid and selfish driving, and of course not all of the skid marks can possibly result in a miss!  Some of these skids will sadly also trigger rear-end collisions (that don’t even involve the drivers who initiated the dangerous situations in question).

It’s by no means just Massachusetts (though this nonsense is very common there). This is the ‘split’ to I-90 east (left lanes) and I-90 west (right lane) from I-87 southbound, at Albany, NY. Again, drivers have left their ‘exit’ to towards I-90W/I-87S too late and have caused dangerous incidents as these 4-5 sets of skid marks show.  This is a location where this type of bad driving is a daily event.

Some ‘politically correct’ road safety advocates will rail against me for referring to late-lane-change drivers as being ‘stupid’, selfish’, ‘ignorant’ or ‘dangerous’ but I’m sorry, having literally picked up many dead or crippled victims of bad driving and investigating the causes during my years as a traffic patrol police officer, I am simply not prepared to play the game of not telling the accurate truth about such idiots for being exactly  what they are: deadly lunatics!

Getting such people to stop their self-important, dangerous driving can only be a matter for law enforcement.  People with this degree of selfishness and stupidity will never listen to reason.

Here, all the skid marks are adjacent to the very end of an on-ramp, showing that failure to yield by drivers entering the highway, combined with a thoughtless failure to move to the left by drivers already on the highway, can also result in skids, which naturally can also end, quite literally, in blood and tears.

The best advice we can give is that if you are ever driven by someone who does this, make absolutely certain that they never get to drive you again.

And if you have a dashcam and you ever get video footage of someone doing this, we hope you will seriously consider giving the video to the police and thereby quite possibly help to save other people’s lives.  Thank you.

Eddie Wren, CEO & Chief Instructor — Advanced Drivers of North America

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All photographs and the text on this post are subject to Copyright law.