My favorite pet peeve is the guy who uses the right lane for his own personal passing lane, instead of vacating it to allow enterrers and exiters to do their thing. Then they get all butthurt and aggrieved when someone enters the lane doing 2 MPH slower than them and slowing them down. Meanwhile, the far left lane is empty.
I was stationed in Germany in the early 70s and there were several road rules that just made sense.
As someone mentioned in Post #73, there is NO PASSING ANYONE on their right. ALL passing must be done on the left. If the guy in the left lane is going slower than the passer, he is obligated to move a lane to the right to allow the passer to pass. Flashing headlights is the universal signal to do that. Horn blowing and middle finger waving are also used. On the autobahn, in rural areas, their is (was?) no speed limit, so it was not uncommon to see a Mercedes in the far left lane, going about 130 MPH, flashing their headlights continuously to clear a lane in front of them.
Trucks are OBLIGATED to drive in the right lane unless overtaking another vehicle, whereupon they must return to the right lane.
Cops watch these things, so it works pretty good.
Another thing I really liked was, traffic lights sequenced from green to amber to red, (as usual), but also cycled from red to amber to green, to alert you to be ready to go. In the 70s, there were a lot of small, cheap, manual transmission cars there, so this may have been designed to alert the driver to get the transmission in gear?
And driving in southern Germany and Austria, there were sequentially flashing strobe lights around sharp curves that were activated if you were traveling faster than you could make the curve. These strobes were spaced maybe 300' apart and could go on for 1/2 mile. The whole sequence repeated about every 2 seconds, leading you around the curve like tracers from a machine gun. They also served to delineate the curve geometry, so you could see exactly where the curve started and stopped. Not so necessary here, as we generally not so constrained by mountains, cliffs, rivers and things, so we can make our curves as gradual as we want.
The 1964 VW I had, with manual transmission, and 1200 CC engine, could go about 50 MPH (80 KPH) flat out if you were level or downhill and no headwind. Made for some extensive pre planning when merging (einfarht)
It had a 6 volt system, those 20" tall narrow tires and bulb-and-reflector style headlights instead of seal beams. But it must have made 50 MPG for gas mileage.
