So, that little slope probably saved my life once.
I was trucking up 44 at a fairly moderate pace (I'm not a big speeder) around a curve when there was suddenly a car in my lane, so I jerked the wheel to the right lane ... where there was another car, I twitch back to the other lane and begin, well, hydroplaning or whatever it is when you have just a touch of rain to bring up the oil from the road. Brakes were not effective and I was headed right for the highway divider at somewhere between forty to fifty miles per hour, at a forty-five degree angle. In this flimsy little car, that corner impact is going to hit me pretty hard.
That's when I looked at the little slope at the base of the highway dividers and reasoned that if I could get my car parallel to the divider, the impact would be taken on the left wheels and the left side of the suspension, areas designed to bear some weight from that particular direction already. I managed to get the car aligned by tweaking the wheel direction, hit, slid for about ten or fifteen feet. I was so nearly perfect to parallel that I only lost the rubber covering to about an inch of bumper. Ended up replacing the tires a few weeks later just out of an abundance of caution, but otherwise fine.
(It turned out that there was a big wreck up around the curve and various drivers had decided to just sort of stop where they were, hence my surprise obstacles)
You weren't hydroplaning. Hydroplaning is when there's so much water your tires can't funnel that water out and you're driving on the surface of the water. You "just" lost traction. And yes the first rains of the season that bring up all the c*ap from the road are notorious for being slippery.
In situations like that you can try to regain traction by making sure the wheels are pointing at the same direction you are traveling, not being on the brakes, etc. Practice on snow or ice in a safe environment. I'm not that great at this myself but I have recovered traction in a handful of real life snow/ice scenarios... Go-karting can also develop some skill/feel for this. You can also take lessons...
In my part of Europe (Slovenia) they now make you take a “safety driving” course within 2 years of getting your license. Skid plates, hydroplaning, all the fun stuff.
My sister got to do it. I missed the fun by a few years and instead practiced with lots of late night drifting fun on fresh snow (don’t tell mom :P)
Hydroplaning below 80 km/h ~49 mp/h is rare and the risk of the wheels loosing contact to the ground increases with speed. So not sure if this was really hydroplaning.
As a tip for others: If you ever encounter hydroplaning make sure not to keep your steering wheel straight (or at least: know why you are doing what you are doing) and step off the gas pedal.
In hydroplaning your wheels don't have contact with the road surface, so turning the wheel won't do shit. But as you loose momentum your wheels will regain contact appruptly again at some point. At that point it really matters how your front wheels are oriented when you do so.
If your front wheels point hard left and there is a dry part of the street you will be yerked directly into oncoming traffic for example.
In the U.S. we're struggling to get them to understand that bike lanes and sidewalks can't just randomly end mid-block and still be useful. While the idea seems ostensibly solid, and cars very much need containment, we still have much more basic needs before we can start optimizing car infrastructure.
No, we can start improving car infrastructure right away because, on the types of roads that have guardrails, cars are like 98% of the traffic or more. And the rare roads that have both guardrails and sidewalks should probably have the sidewalks on the far side of the guardrails, at which point improved guardrails also protect pedestrians.
Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else). I'm kind of surprised more states haven't done it yet. Failing that, it's probably better to also use guardrails to physically separate the bike lanes from the motor lanes, which is yet another use-case for improved guardrails.
Part of the problem is that the US has a lot of roads. So often, the comparison that is made is not “which guardrail is the best”, but, “which places can we budget to install a guardrail?”
This is why even though the safety of cable barriers is disputed, the overall number of lives saved by them is usually said to be quite positive, because we can afford to install more of them. Hitting a shitty cheap guardrail (or cable) is usually better than hitting a vehicle head-on or hitting a bridge support.
Also, those end caps on that guardrail are not considered a safe design and aren’t really used in the US anymore because they spear vehicles when hit directly on the end.
That would just encourage more drivers to do what Ross Chastain did and probably make the race more about which driver can within the physical abuse of hitting the barrier.
Amazingly well thought out design. If you want something as impactful (hah) think about the fluid related mechanics of urinal and toilet design, and how much thought has to go into splashback.
Jersey kerb has become ubiquitous worldwide.
Interestingly, the alternate designs often used (guyed wires, steel barrier) have good and bad points, for survivability if an impact is unavoidable. They "give" -and in some circumstances, thats exactly what you want. Jersey Kerb is for the "nope: no giving here: wear the decelleration, hard" situations where giving (eg. into the oncoming traffic flow) would be worse overall.
If you're having trouble reading the diagrams, several barrier types are available in this New Zealand Transport Agency publication [1]. The F-shape barrier is detailed on page 10.
Wire barriers are more common outside of city, urban areas where you start getting into long stretches without much else[0].
Of course they're cheap and easy to install, but their main downsides are, having a higher rate of killing those who get caught up in them and are only really good for one use.
The wire rope barriers have been installed all over Texas interstate highways which, in the past had no barriers to prevent traffic from crossing medians into oncoming traffic. A lot of bad accidents happened when vehicles crossed a grass median and slammed head-on into oncoming traffic. Years ago in an ice storm I almost became a statistic when a vehicle hit some black ice and the driver lost control, launching their vehicle across the median towards our vehicle.
They had installed miles of these wire rope barriers in the last 10 years and I have seen them being installed up in Oklahoma too.
Of course, once there is an accident the wire rope may have been strained past its rated capacity so it needs to be replaced. You can buy spools of the wire rope [0] from recycled materials handlers. Along the interstates near my place you will see skid marks into the cable barriers every time the highways get wet. If the weather was really bad you could find a dozen new collision spots in a 20 mile stretch. It keeps the repair crews busy. People drive too fast out here nowadays.
The pdf document posted is a great read. I see several barrier designs there that I have never seen in use anywhere and all the familiar ones too.
The most common barrier for many years in Texas has been the W-beam SGR04B type or similarly, the thrie-beam rail SGR09B but they tend to use treated timber posts for mounts. The newer installations have impact-absorbing lead-ins to help prevent fatalities.
A couple years ago I was driving home along a two-lane US highway (not an interstate) where the W-beams were used at every creek or river crossing. As I rounded a long curve in the highway headed downhill towards a creek crossing about 1000' away (305 m) I saw skid marks leading to the edge of the highway where the guard rails should've been. The skid marks were obviously made by an 18-wheeler (semi) truck-trailer. The guard rail was completely wiped out and as I passed the creek I saw where it came to rest. The entire length of rail was curled and twisted with one end up more than 30' (9.1 m) in a tree beside the creek more than 30' (9.1 m) off of the highway and the other end curled down near to the ground. It had been launched up into the tree by the force of the collision.
I started in engineering before moving into applied math backend numerical engineering .. I still appreciate the quiet understatement of phyical testing results such as:
> To contain and redirect a 36,000-kg gasoline tanker after impacts at high angles and speeds, a 2290-mm (90-in) concrete barrier is required.
[ picture of hard impact big truck side humping and sliding into said barrier ]
These have been lifesavers. Highway 101 in South San Jose used to be called "Blood Alley" for lack of effective separators. The biggest reduction in traffic fatalities historically accompanied their adoption.
Readit News
I was trucking up 44 at a fairly moderate pace (I'm not a big speeder) around a curve when there was suddenly a car in my lane, so I jerked the wheel to the right lane ... where there was another car, I twitch back to the other lane and begin, well, hydroplaning or whatever it is when you have just a touch of rain to bring up the oil from the road. Brakes were not effective and I was headed right for the highway divider at somewhere between forty to fifty miles per hour, at a forty-five degree angle. In this flimsy little car, that corner impact is going to hit me pretty hard.
That's when I looked at the little slope at the base of the highway dividers and reasoned that if I could get my car parallel to the divider, the impact would be taken on the left wheels and the left side of the suspension, areas designed to bear some weight from that particular direction already. I managed to get the car aligned by tweaking the wheel direction, hit, slid for about ten or fifteen feet. I was so nearly perfect to parallel that I only lost the rubber covering to about an inch of bumper. Ended up replacing the tires a few weeks later just out of an abundance of caution, but otherwise fine.
(It turned out that there was a big wreck up around the curve and various drivers had decided to just sort of stop where they were, hence my surprise obstacles)
In situations like that you can try to regain traction by making sure the wheels are pointing at the same direction you are traveling, not being on the brakes, etc. Practice on snow or ice in a safe environment. I'm not that great at this myself but I have recovered traction in a handful of real life snow/ice scenarios... Go-karting can also develop some skill/feel for this. You can also take lessons...
In my part of Europe (Slovenia) they now make you take a “safety driving” course within 2 years of getting your license. Skid plates, hydroplaning, all the fun stuff.
My sister got to do it. I missed the fun by a few years and instead practiced with lots of late night drifting fun on fresh snow (don’t tell mom :P)
As a tip for others: If you ever encounter hydroplaning make sure not to keep your steering wheel straight (or at least: know why you are doing what you are doing) and step off the gas pedal.
In hydroplaning your wheels don't have contact with the road surface, so turning the wheel won't do shit. But as you loose momentum your wheels will regain contact appruptly again at some point. At that point it really matters how your front wheels are oriented when you do so.
If your front wheels point hard left and there is a dry part of the street you will be yerked directly into oncoming traffic for example.
remove the "not".
> (or at least: know why you are doing what you are doing)
Remove that too, it's unnecessary.
>> fairly moderate pace (I'm not a big speeder)
But you were speeding, right? On a wet roadway with what sounds like poor visibility.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/this-new-korea...
Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else). I'm kind of surprised more states haven't done it yet. Failing that, it's probably better to also use guardrails to physically separate the bike lanes from the motor lanes, which is yet another use-case for improved guardrails.
Part of the problem is that the US has a lot of roads. So often, the comparison that is made is not “which guardrail is the best”, but, “which places can we budget to install a guardrail?”
This is why even though the safety of cable barriers is disputed, the overall number of lives saved by them is usually said to be quite positive, because we can afford to install more of them. Hitting a shitty cheap guardrail (or cable) is usually better than hitting a vehicle head-on or hitting a bridge support.
Also, those end caps on that guardrail are not considered a safe design and aren’t really used in the US anymore because they spear vehicles when hit directly on the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3yNc5EasW8
Jersey kerb has become ubiquitous worldwide.
Interestingly, the alternate designs often used (guyed wires, steel barrier) have good and bad points, for survivability if an impact is unavoidable. They "give" -and in some circumstances, thats exactly what you want. Jersey Kerb is for the "nope: no giving here: wear the decelleration, hard" situations where giving (eg. into the oncoming traffic flow) would be worse overall.
I thought that is what the plastic filters at the bottom assisted with
[1] https://arco.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/m23-road-safet...
Of course they're cheap and easy to install, but their main downsides are, having a higher rate of killing those who get caught up in them and are only really good for one use.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2347588,-122.237414,3a,75y,3...
They had installed miles of these wire rope barriers in the last 10 years and I have seen them being installed up in Oklahoma too.
Of course, once there is an accident the wire rope may have been strained past its rated capacity so it needs to be replaced. You can buy spools of the wire rope [0] from recycled materials handlers. Along the interstates near my place you will see skid marks into the cable barriers every time the highways get wet. If the weather was really bad you could find a dozen new collision spots in a 20 mile stretch. It keeps the repair crews busy. People drive too fast out here nowadays.
The pdf document posted is a great read. I see several barrier designs there that I have never seen in use anywhere and all the familiar ones too.
The most common barrier for many years in Texas has been the W-beam SGR04B type or similarly, the thrie-beam rail SGR09B but they tend to use treated timber posts for mounts. The newer installations have impact-absorbing lead-ins to help prevent fatalities.
A couple years ago I was driving home along a two-lane US highway (not an interstate) where the W-beams were used at every creek or river crossing. As I rounded a long curve in the highway headed downhill towards a creek crossing about 1000' away (305 m) I saw skid marks leading to the edge of the highway where the guard rails should've been. The skid marks were obviously made by an 18-wheeler (semi) truck-trailer. The guard rail was completely wiped out and as I passed the creek I saw where it came to rest. The entire length of rail was curled and twisted with one end up more than 30' (9.1 m) in a tree beside the creek more than 30' (9.1 m) off of the highway and the other end curled down near to the ground. It had been launched up into the tree by the force of the collision.
[0] https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/median-galvanized-cab...
Deleted Comment
> To contain and redirect a 36,000-kg gasoline tanker after impacts at high angles and speeds, a 2290-mm (90-in) concrete barrier is required.
[ picture of hard impact big truck side humping and sliding into said barrier ]
However the US improvement is 3-5X less than other similar countries. For details on that and links to some data sources, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4103211/
Deleted Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6CKltZfToY