It might all be cultural differences though. I noticed drivers seemed more attentive and never used their phones (unless completely stopped in traffic jams), whereas here in the U.S. it is extremely common to have drivers piddling in the left lane and absolutely oblivious to the goings on around them.

The only stressor I could see from driving on the autobahn was easily overcome - before passing someone on the left, just be sure to check really, really far back towards the horizon to make sure one one is coming.

That said, if you do have an accident at those speeds... The one wreck I saw looked like a tin can had met a hydraulic press.

Also, speed limits on the Autobahn are lower in construction zones, urban areas with more traffic, and anywhere the roads are not that great (still good by Jersey Turnpike standards).

The stretches with no speed limit are really well maintained.

Sure, as an Austrian I prefer driving on German autobahns as well (due to better perceived discipline), but the US trip was something else entirely - and I've come to think that it's maybe because almost every car has cruise control.

It's not even the speed differences between different lanes, but staying in lane, setting CC and not having to correct it for a really long time is not something I was used to, and going 600km or more a day left me far less tired than over here.

EDIT: Maybe there are intra-US differences as well? Since most here seem to talk about California...

Outside of the big cities, it can be much more relaxing. I drove across the mid-west and did the same as you. Drive at 70-80 mph and not take the cruise control off for hours.

On a typical 3-lane highway, the right lane will have many big trucks, plus merging traffic entering and exiting constantly. The center lane puts them right in the middle of all the chaos, getting passed by other traffic regularly on both sides. In the left lane they can set their cruise control to 5mph below the limit and squat.

Even when there are lulls in the amount of traffic, many times I have approached this type of driver from behind in the left lane, paused to see if they would move over for me to pass, and they almost never do.

Disclaimer: I like to drive 5-10mph over the speed limit :)

Horrifying! :) But yes, the left lane is much nicer to camp out in on, say, a long commute - as long as you can handle maintaining the speed.

I live in the Dallas area and the lanes usually seem to be, from right to left: "the limit", "+5-10” and "+10-15". 15mph over is my cutoff, more or less, so I keep an eye on the mirror and try to shift over if someone is clearly coming up fast. Besides, don't want anyone tailgating me at those speeds tbh.

Does get a bit aggravating when what I consider "safe following distance at speed" is considered by the driver behind me as "this dumb econo-box being slow" and they whip around me. Doubly so when all it achieves is the two of us swapping places because there are no open avenues forward, lol. I'd have given it to him if there was one.

But "everyone else is a bad driver" will always be with us (myself no exception) so what can you do but grin and turn the music up.

I can appreciate not wanting to go back and forth between say the middle lane and left lane all the time. I just wish people could figure out they are holding up traffic and get out of the way for a minute or two every now and then.

That is about as self centered one can be in trafic. In reality, they are endangering themself and everybody else near them.

I base that on sideways skid marks and wall impact.

If I do a steady 140 km/h in the middle lane, as mostly everybody else (here in germany), then why am I endangering anybody, if I just stay there? There is still the left lane for the faster ones and the right for the slower. (in the 3 lane scenario)

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Ch...

I lived in Massachusetts for 3 years and routinely passed people on the right, sometimes even in the breakdown lane if it was open for traffic.

Isn't that a thing in the U.S. as well? At least where I'm from (the northeast), passing someone on the right generally gets you a loud honk on the horn and occasionally a flip-off.

I disagree with strictfp that "staying to the right" creates unnecessary traffic dynamics. What happens in California is worse. Someone holds up the left lane, so all the faster cars will pile up on the right lane and try to sneak in front of the slow car, but inevitably they'll cut someone off and set off a chain reaction of braking for everyone that was patiently queued up in the left lane.

(Granted on two-lane I-5 there are some legitimate a reason for this: the right lane is used heavily by trucks, so the road wears down quicker and becomes rougher in the right lane than the left. Naturally people gravitate towards smoother asphalt. And if you just passed a truck a few minutes back and are gonna pass another one again, why not just stay in this lane?)

Since the US infrastructure system is a colossal piece of shit, highways built 40 years ago still stand exactly as they were then today having to accommodate multiple times more traffic than they were ever meant to. This breaks down the road rules when its bumper to bumper and every lane is backed up.

Meanwhile, the leftmost lane attracts people wanting to drive faster than traffic, the people who just want to get one car ahead, as well as the people who just want to drive without having to let cars in all the time.

If there's only two lanes -- like on most rural interstates -- and sufficient volume exists to prevent the left lane from actually clearing out cars, this creates a tragedy-of-commons situation in the left lane where there's more empty space in the right lane than in the left. A subset of people will then use the empty slots in the right lane to try to get ahead, making the situation even riskier.

But this poster's right; the root cause is not enough lanes to ensure a high level-of-service.

It would be much more informational to take into account things like average number of cars traveling between various locations, number of lanes between said locations, residential density...

By that logic, that would mean at 11pm at night on US-101 between SF and San Jose, I shouldn't need to pass anyone on the right, but I guarantee you there's always drivers lingering in the left-most lane.

It refers to passing people while in an exit-only lane, turn-only lane, shoulder, etc.

Now, yes, you get situations where people veer from lane to lane because the overall flow of traffic isn't fast enough for their tastes. But, especially on three lane each direction roads, you get cars and trucks that don't want to deal with merging traffic at exits just sitting in the middle.

Yes, but not normally observed in more densely populated areas. In Los Angeles, for example, it's use any lane you can to pass. I've personally witnessed people, who were driving slower than the flow of traffic, move all the way to the left to "get out of the way" of other drivers. It's well-intentioned, though poor understanding.

Licensing needs to be more rigorous, but many cities rely very heavily on commuting without a proper public transportation infrastructure in place.

Also, I pass people on the right all the time, but I blame them for it. :-) If people don't want to be passed on the right, they shouldn't drive on the left. Simple enough.

Laws for passing on the left was intended for roads with one lane going in opposite directions.

Driving the speed limit is considered normal speed according to case law. Slow traffic is going 10 on a 25.

I'm guessing you've never been to any developing country. India doesn't even respect traffic lights or the concept of "lanes." You have modern cars sharing the roads with literal ox-drawn carriages and they're all splitting lanes with hundreds of little scooters.

Hell, even Italy is a complete clusterfuck. If Germany is stressful to drive in for someone I would question if that person is comfortable behind the wheel of a car at all.

In fact, I'll say this is one of the big problems with how lax driving standards are in America. There are lots of people who drive everywhere here who do NOT have the skill, attention span, or reflexes to be behind the wheel of a car. It's too economically essential to be a functioning member of society to make the standards any stricter, but they're so lax that we have a glut of terrible drivers. Terrible drivers lead to overly permissive road design (that winds up being unsafe for anyone not in a car like bikers, cyclists or pedestrians) and that just leads to a bad quality of life overall for everyone.

Yet people do manage to have some kind of order within chaos, that makes the whole traffic flow.

Yes, but only until you understand the trick: do NOT expect perfect adherence to driving code from others. That's it!

For example, when approaching an intersection where you have right of way, expect someone to try and pass anyway: it basically means slowing a bit down and paying attention on the incoming roads. Applying this grain of salt would prevent a good part of the car crashes I see on youtube (namely "driving in Russia", but not only).

And, by the way, expecting bad behaviour from others is not a justification for when I'll be the other.

Self driving cars don't need new infrastructure, its functionally an application that runs on existing infrastructure. If you have decent roads it'll work the same way whether you're in India or anywhere else.

Although I guess you could argue that Indians are less prissy about what they're willing to tolerate. A self-driving auto-rickshaw wouldn't fly in America, but it would be just fine for just about any Indian, and it's a much more useful application of self-driving tech than expecting everyone to have their own robo-chauffeured luxury cars.

So should we only allow some of the population to utilize cars? Considering how vital they are to the American lifestyle (the US covers so much land), that seems unreasonable.

How is the rest of the population supposed to get around?

However, despite the amazing hiking/backpacking places we can go here, we have only done that a few times (relying on other people driving).

Should we always rely on other people to go to non-public transportation routes (This has also hampered us from doing lots of other things hence why we got a zipcar membership recently)?

And it will cost you - over the whole course it will almost certainly be above € 1000 and generally depend on how well you do, how many sessions/tests you need. With these kind of costs people take this very serious and still fail all the time.

Naturally I'm not a fan of the costs, but I think thorough preparation and training is essential. Operating a car is a huge responsibility that affects not only your safety but that of other drivers, pedestrians, passengers, etc. Getting the license to do so should not be a cakewalk.

On a sidenote: Of course this approach requires valid alternatives to a car, like efficient public transport options, but that's another discussion.

I don't know how you just pulled "25%" out of the air. Most people could be trained to drive better, they just never bother learning because the standards for licensing are so lax that there is no downside to doing so. There are lots of areas where you can get a drivers' license without even knowing how to parallel park.

The assumption with this requirement is that the parents are good drivers. That may or may not be the case. It would be better to require that the 50 hours be completed with a certified driving instructor.

Now, one has to compare similar situations, not a German Autobahn in a Metropolitan region with a empty desert highway... But comparing a busy Autobahn with a busy freeway (say the interstate into Chicago), I found the freeway to be much more stressful. People are passing on both sides! And there is not much speed differential. I can't just fall back to the right if I want to take it slow. There is often no emergency lane. I feel like I'm being pushed along, and if I can't keep up, I will be ran over.

In Germany, people can go faster, but it feels very predictable, clockwork-like. Yes, you have occasional idiots speeding with 250 km/h on the left lane that don't slow down and assume you will move out of the way out of self-preservation. But those are outliers, other than that I rarely have complaints. Maybe it is a cliche, but it seems the drivers' education, and the condition of cars and streets, is really good in Germany.

It is not a cliche. I have lived in the US for the past 5 years and lived for 20 years in Germany before that. Germans roads are like 5000x better than US roads (at least here in California).

Road paintings here are a joke, especially at night or when it is raining. The only exception is when a road gets painted freshly. Then it is good for like 2 months.

Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.

(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)

I live in the US and switch to those tires in the winter and find that they have much better traction compared to the all season tires I have on my other car. Other than icy conditions, does having studs have much advantage over studless. I suspect that the damage to roadways caused by studs could be substantially reduced if more people used studless snow tires in the winter.

Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.

It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.

If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.

(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)

We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.

What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.

In Germany it is in one direction only. Left to overtake, right to pull back over. In addition you do have to monitor your back mirror more carefully, which people in the US do not seem to do (though they should). In Germany, virtually no one plays with their phones on highways.

Also, traffic deaths are more than half in Germany than in the US, despite higher speeds [0].

I feel like traffic rage in the US is much more prevailent, particularly in the east coast. Having said that, Dutch or Danish traffic is far more relaxing. But also much much slower...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

The highways are also regularly torn up and rebuilt to maintain a glass-smooth surface on which one could safely drive 300 km/h, but it's only possible to maintain that for a minute because then you hit another construction zone or traffic jam caused by inadequate capacity. Despite all the construction, the highways rarely get widened, just resurfaced.

I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.

I don't know.

I drove throughout Germany a few times last year, and I didn't really understand why there were so many jams and general slowdowns. I usually drive in France where the highways are almost exactly the same as Germany (most often two lanes, frequently three, rarely more, usually in very good state) and traffic is rarely as bad. I got stranded a few times in completely still traffic, for tens of minutes, during a normal working day, while this only ever happens at the worst time of holiday traffic in France.

Maybe it's because French highways are paying which probably discourages some drivers, but I also noticed a lot of roadworks in Germany (almost as bad as Belgium during the height of roadworks there last year). Enough, as you said, to never be able to maintain a high speed for long, while you barely ever notice those in France. I don't know how French companies do it, but I'm pretty sure it helps with the traffic.

Other than the traffic though, driving in Germany was a pleasure. People are aware of their surroundings and don't drive like the road was theirs.

And the fact that the French highways require payment reduce trafic even more. But they are a joy to drive on. Set the CC and just go.

In Germany, the logistics clearly utilizes the autobahns a lot. You see constant lines of heavy vehicles on the rightmost lane, and sometimes your overtaking them is interrupted by one truck passing another one, very very slowly as they both have a speed limiter, just adjusted slightly differently.

I'm pretty sure Germany is trying to use less road for a lot more cars and everything else is secondary with regard to traffic jams.

Actually the limited number of lanes is what enables us to survive the speed differentials. Fast/[middle/]slow lanes can easily be enumerated without counting, which makes situational awareness so much easier. And you certainly do need a lot of situational awareness. It's a bit like CPU registers vs. an unconstrained stack.

I have only ever seen more than three regular lanes in large metropolitan areas where there is hardly any open road between interchanges and where speed limits are a certainty. I don't know if a single piece of four lane unrestricted driving exists in all of Germany, I would not even be entirely surprised if you could not legally build one.

Anecdote: recently went from Offenburg to Stuttgart and back and could drive a pretty much constant 190~240kph all the way (~1h30) except for a couple sections which were not unlimited. Having to slow down to 190kph isn't quite what I'd call a traffic jam. 300kph is just harder because there's not that many vehicles able to go that fast, so you end up catching up with the "slower" (so to speak) ones, and since vehicles are (supposed to) be electronically limited to 250kph, you're bound to meet some anyway.

It was my impression that vehicles aren't supposed to be able to go faster than the speed rating of their tires. Since 250 km/h is a common speed rating for tires, and higher ratings tend to get expensive fast, German cars are often limited to 250 km/h.

No current Porsches (real ones, not the SUVs) are that slow, and the Porsche tire recommendation guide calls for tires rated for 300 km/h, or "over 300 km/h" (the standardized ratings don't go higher) for all models except the Macan SUV with 18" wheels, for which it recommends 270 km/h.

http://files2.porsche.com/filestore/download/usa/none/porsch...

You can thus see why the index of stock tires always vastly overshoot the top speed of a car, e.g my car gets a Y tyre stock even though its top speed is 245kph, and my ex car has a W rating when the top speed is 210kph.

It's not a good idea to go anywhere near the limit of your tire speed index, nor to go cheap and skimp on the index when buying a replacement tire.

I bet the Macan that gets 18" and the W index is the one with low enough top speeds (below 230kph, that'd be 2.0L four-pot petrol and 3.0L V6 Diesel ones)

EDIT: found a reference again WRT index tests

> Speed ratings are based on laboratory tests where the tire is pressed against a large diameter metal drum to reflect its appropriate load, and run at ever increasing speeds (in 6.2 mph steps in 10 minute increments) until the tire's required speed has been met.

https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...

Almost every freeway around major American cities is 4 lanes and yet traffic persists. Some freeways in LA are 6 lane parking lots.

On a highway with no speed limit and only 2 lanes, the difference between the right lane and the left lane is just so freaking huge, you are stressed out every time you need to pass a truck or slower car, and almost always see your random Ferrari / Maseratti / Porsche approaching at a fraction of second of the time you spend on the left lane.

I would advocate for no speed limit on highways with >= 3 lanes, but would put a limit of 140-150 on those with only 2.

I have noticed that a lot of people change into the middle lane for no reason at all. This results in you having to pass on the right, especially if there is a slow driver on the left lane. So now you have to change 2 lanes to pass 2 cars....

Fact is, if you learn how to drive well and everyone else does as well, then driving is not at all stressful. You can still use your cruise control in Germany, just not on the left lane (if you are going 80 or whatever).

I've always wanted to take a dash cam and compare the driving styles when driving to the Eurotunnel in the UK and then driving across Belgium. The ring around Antwerp is an absolute mess of people driving in a dangerous manner.

Belgian drivers typically will leave no more than a 1 second gap. In the UK this is repeatedly drummed into you that it should be 3 seconds.

Also I find Belgian and Dutch drivers react erractically, they will switch lanes erratically and move very close to the car in front before switching lanes often without indicating. Germans and British seem to leave much more room and perform maneouvres in a much more deliberate manner.

Certainly with Belgian drivers, this is back up with statistics, their death rates per 100k population are 2x that in the UK and 1.5x Germany [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Driving in Italy, Rome esp, is fine too. There is a reason the red light is so big and so much larger than the green light though :)

Germany is the best country in the world in which to drive.

Drivers are trained well. They look before they turn. THEY DON'T USE THE LEFT LANE AS A CRUISING LANE - they move over, pass, and return to the right lane. They use their turn signal.

You can go very, very fast in situations where it's warranted. In situations where it's not, people slow down. As someone who walks, rides a bike, and enjoys not being deafened by road noise in towns, this is good.

My experience driving has primarily been California, Ireland, and Germany, and Germany has been _far_ superior to the other two.

Because people know cars can fly past them with more than 200 kmh, they also actually stay to the right and use the left lane to pass and not to cruise. All in all it's a pleasant experience and all a driver really needs to wrap his head around is to keep as much track of the traffic behind and as in the front.