those are the things that bother me. Who cares if you have your fog lights on.. They're not blinding anyone. Here in the Netherlands there is a huge fine for driving on the far lane on a highway..(Here is the left lane).. for a long amount of time. Even if the road is completely empty, they will ticket you for it!. Its just bull that they give you a ticket for the most insignificant things. If you drive to fast in the suburbs, alright, i get that, theres children at play etc. But tripleing the fine of having to little distance between your car and the one in front of you when you drive faster than 80km/h is just plain nonsense. Every physicist will know that you decelerate at the same rate whether you are driving 40 or 200. Its just those stupid things that bother me. Another one being a large fine for driving on a public road with a scooter when you *should* be on the bikepath. But why on the bike path? its way too dangerous driving 60 km/h with bikers going about 20..
Interesting reply Amon, I retract my more offensive comments, and apologise. I see your point about some police officers. Evidently where you come from and where I come from are very different, and so are the police force. And my point about saving people's lives.... I didn't mean so literally. By stopping drunk drivers or by taking people home who are lost on a cold night because they drank so much, they're saving lives. And just a quick mention - police around me don't bother with country roads. Just dual carrigeways and towns. Maybe the reason I bend down and conform to the system is because I'm so institutionalised. However I still feel the "better for the people" approach is valid, especially in the case of the way the UK handles firearms in comparison to the way that America does. But perhaps America's gun crime problems are more due to the way some people are brought up.
That will make no difference. They'll react just as fast when they are going 40.. The fact is, you will decelerate just as fast whether your going 40 or 100. The person in front of you the same. It happens as follows. Your both driving 120 km/h on a high way. Car A is in front, Car B is behind. Car A suddenly brakes decelerating at 10 km/h/s. It takes Car B's driver 1 second to react. This means now Car B starts to decelerate at 10km/h/s. Car A is now going 110 km/h while Car B is still doing 120 km/h. However, they are now slowing down at the same rate, meaning they will always have a difference in velocity of 10 km/h. Until they both stand still that is. The same is the case for when you are both going 40 km/h, you will still decelerate at the same speed. So why is the fine 3x higher? I don't know.. What they should do is make the distance needed between two cars greater when going faster than 80km/h cause clearly the bumper to bumper accident is just as likely to happen.
The stopping distance increases massively as you go faster Reaction distance + stopping distance = total distance travelled. If you're going above the limit and you notice someone walking out into the road or something falls into your path you may not stop in time.
yes.. thats if there is something in front of you that is standing still. The car in front if you is slowing down at the same rate as you, so there the greater stopping distance doesn't affect you.. So why should the fine be so much more expensive?
lex, I don't know how much physics you've done, but if you consider that braking works by the brakes dissipating kinetic energy as heat, and KE=0.5mv2 then deceleration is not uniform at all...
If your thinking distance is greater than the person in front of you, and you're tailgating.. it could get messy. the car infront goes from 70 to 50. you stay at 70. It's not going to take long for you to realize that you're decelerating at different speeds. I.e. you aren't decelerating at all yet.
Alright.. i worked it out and i got something a little wrong.. Car A and B are traveling at 120 km/h. Car A brakes and decelerates at 10km/h/s. Exactly one second later Car B starts to decelerate at the same rate. At the instant that Car B starts to decelerate the velocity difference of the two cars is 10 km/h. This will stay the same throughout the whole deceleration untill Car B crashes into Car A because if the velocity difference. So the final impact will be an impact of 10 km/h of Car B into Car A, but they will be both going whatever speed they are going. So considering this happens on the highway and everyone is going in the same direction the chance of hitting something is very small because everything is going in the same direction. However on a provincial road, where you are allowed to go 70km/h there is no barrier between the roads, so the change you hit something is greater. So i think that there should be no difference in price of the ticket.
*sigh* They DON'T both decelerate at 10km/h/s for the whole deceleration Their velocities decrease as something like x-2. You're not considering people swerving to avoid crashing and therefore screwing things up big time because they go into different lanes with people doing very different/opposite speeds You're not considering that if you go a bit faster, you have a lot more energy to throw around at people You're right to question authority, but your physics is dire.
If the slower lains are empty why drive on the fast lane? Left lain hogger are annoying as hell. you're not allowed to drive faster then 40 km/h on a scooter. Hence why driving on the normal road isn't allowed. You'll would be drving 10 km/h slower then the rest of traffic.
On the contrary - the acceleration provided by the braking force will be (roughly, neglecting brake fading, engine braking changing with its own speed and wind resistance) even throughout, and since F= m a, the acceleration will be constant throughout. The KE may well be varying drastically as you accelerate, but that's not affecting the acceleration. Your physics isn't really up to par, ch424 has it just right, the only way to avoid the accident (assuming you stay in your lane) is to outbrake the person in front in this situation. The reason the minimum distances are imposed is that the braking time to stop is greater than the time it'll take for the difference in the velocities of the two cars to cover the distance between them.
iirc the ones here get about 50k AUD per year plus package and most don't have to get out of the truck ( Wheelie bin + lifting arm on truck Cheesecake) though i dont think i could stand doing 6 hours of driving a truck per weekday (yeah they get short days as well)
Yes.. thats what i mean. But at the point of impact the velocity difference between the two cars is equal to the velocity the car in front decelerated while the car behind was still reacting. If it decelerates at 10km/h/s and the reaction time is 1 second the impact velocity will be 10km/h/s but will happen sooner or later into the event depending on the initial velocities. It would also be safer on a highway because there is no oncoming traffic you could catastrophically hit into. There is only the traffic going in the same direction which is most likely decelerating as well because they saw he accident happen.
