Stevie D wrote:A lot of those things you put down as positive, I'm really not sure about.
- Lots of lanes meaning chaotic driving, especially combined with it being largely a free-for-all with no slow lane - tends to lead to platoons of traffic all moving at similar speeds, which means it is difficult if you want to drive faster or slower, and leads to more weaving.
The concept of KRETP is understood in the US, though not as rigorously observed as admirers of European driving norms would wish. The real problem is long columns of cars entering on short headways at closely spaced on-ramps, which often results in the lane next to the right-hand lane becoming the "slow" lane by default. Ramp metering mitigates this problem but is far from universal.
Stevie D wrote:- Not keen on trucks doing the same speed as cars, the weight in those things means that at 70mph they take a hell of a lot of stopping (especially with liquid cargo) and the damage they can do at higher speeds is catastrophic.
Relatively little liquid goes by road in the US since pipelines and freight rail have higher mode shares than in most western European countries. FHWA did a comparative study several years ago that looked at states with differential speed limits (lower limits for trucks) and was not able to find any evidence that truck-related accidents were less frequent or less severe in those states than in others with uniform limits for trucks and cars. Some states (notably Ohio and Texas) have jettisoned their truck limits, though they still persist in California.
Stevie D wrote:- Paying for fuel before you fill up ... why? I want to fill the tank, I have no idea how much that is going to cost, just let me brim it and pay for what I have used. It's an absurd system.
It is inconvenient if you are working with cash, but it is not absurd--it is designed to prevent "gas-and-dash" (which is now grounds for driver license suspension in many US states).
Burns wrote:What I found a bit disconcerting was how narrow the lanes were, especially when you consider that the average American car is bigger than the average British car. Take, for example
US101 north of the Golden Gate Bridge and compare it with
the M90. I'd say the M90 with its two lanes and hard shoulder takes up more space than four lanes of US101.
Current lane width standards for high-type roads are essentially the same in the US and the UK (they were identical when the UK still used feet and inches). Truvelo is correct to intuit that this length of freeway US 101 (near Sausalito) originally opened with just six lanes but was later restriped to eight with no real increase in width.
USGS 1956 aerial photo showing original six-lane configuration
Some of the roads you traversed, including what sounds like California SR 140 between Mariposa and the Yosemite NP west entrance, were paved long ago but have been slow to receive attention because it is very expensive to secure modern standards of unit lane width and minimum horizontal curve radius for the traffic they carry. In the specific case of SR 140 the Merced River runs closely parallel and constrains the possibilities for alignment.
California has a number of
"one-lane state highways"--roads maintained as primary state highways by Caltrans but nevertheless so narrow that they have a special striping pattern consisting of two white edgelines with no centerline. An example:
SR 4 at Ebbetts Pass summit
Caltrans is slowly improving them out of existence. The key thing is that, within the context of the California state highway system as a whole, these and other challenging lengths of road are fairly isolated.