What is the dumbest thing you have seen while on the road?

Here is southern CA it is usually a move related to impatience. Cutting off traffic or lane change to get a 5 second advantage. A marginal pass to get another 2 MPH for a few minutes. The risk/reward scale is out of whack.

This month's honors: The guy on hwy 395 north of Adelanto, maybe in Red Mountain, who passed a line of vehicles through multiple left turn pockets and median marked no passing.

Cummins12V98 wrote:
Not the dumbest thing I have seen but I do have proof!

Jacked up 2500 heading down the highway bouncing and swerving like a snake.

Don't think it is lifted, looks normal for a 4wd to me. Togue weight might be light but. I toe a like setup with no problem.

feet on dash.
feet out back of station wagon on trips. kids climbing all over seats and re-arranging.

geez...it was an old timey way of doing things back when :) :)

was it right, probably not but what is wrong with feet up on dash while driving for a passenger? nothing I can see.

if you are waiting for air bags to deploy and kill someone, then yea I see your point but that is living life a bit on the sissy side don't ya think? freak things happen but not ALL THE time. :)

We saw a truck camper with the back door open. Only door I guess. The woman inside was leaning out the door holding desperatly on and trying to grab it and shut it. We speeded up and I yelled out the window to the driver to pull over.I have always wished that my husband pulled over also to see just what had happened.

Pulling to big of a travel trailer with to little a two vehicle and speeding. Almost every long interstate trip we take we see some accident with a travel trailer. Coming from Maine we saw one flipped. It's the journey and the destination. Just because you can make the monthly doesn't make you an river....

4x4ord wrote:
One of the dumbest things I saw was a truck driving down a mountain highway about 10 feet ahead of an old single axle Terry holiday trailer that was no longer attached and obviously had no safety chains or trailer brakes. I was visiting with my sister as I was hooking my truck up to the trailer and I didn't push the little ball lock thingy down nor did I hook up the safety chains. We got going down the highway and hit a railroad crossing at 50 mph. I watched in the mirror and saw the trailer bounce up in the air and immediately recognized it had come unhooked. I calmly said to my wife "we just lost our trailer". She didn't believe me so I said " no really its chasing us down the highway". The kids thought it was great fun but when my wife saw I wasn't joking she started beating on me calling me an idiot. We crossed a bridge which had a curb at the edge of the road. The road was crowned in the middle so the trailer started to veer to the right. It bounced off the curb and headed to the left I was about ready to slam on the brakes to let it pile into my truck as there was on coming traffic but the crown in the road was enough to send back to the right again. It bounced again off the curb and eventually after crossing the bridge it went off into the ditch. I hooked on to the back bumper with a tow strap and pulled it back onto the road and by this time a couple other vehicles stopped to help. The wires were pulled out of the plug and the jack was damaged but other than that it was only my pride that was hurt. We had enough help to manually lift it up onto the ball hitch and after reattaching the wires we were on our way.

(and during the entire time Yakety Sax was playing in the background)

mdamerell wrote:

ECones wrote:

jfkmk wrote:

et2 wrote:

Desert Captain wrote:
I'm sure this list could be endless but my personal favorite, frequently seen (saw it again today, twice), are the chuckleheaded passengers with their (usually), bare feet crossed up on the dash. Gee, I wonder how long it will take their knees to go back through their teeth when the air bag deploys?
:S

That's nothing. Wait until you see the driver with the left on the dash or out the window, and yes I have, more than once. Usually it's a very young person. I can't understand it being comfortable at all, yet safe.

What's a chucklehead?

I saw the driver of an 18-wheeler doing this in traffic. I have no idea how he was using his clutch.

The clutch just get's it rolling. After that, shifts are clutchless. At least that was the case the last time I drove one -- 30 years ago ;)

Heck we have a few auto shifts now. Manual trans but the computer does all the shifting. Just a brake and accelerator(gas pedal) no clutch pedal. Much prefer to shift myself. Clutch to roll and "float" the gears after that.

Ah! You can probably tell I've never driven an 18-wheeler!

ECones wrote:

jfkmk wrote:

et2 wrote:

Desert Captain wrote:
I'm sure this list could be endless but my personal favorite, frequently seen (saw it again today, twice), are the chuckleheaded passengers with their (usually), bare feet crossed up on the dash. Gee, I wonder how long it will take their knees to go back through their teeth when the air bag deploys?
:S

That's nothing. Wait until you see the driver with the left on the dash or out the window, and yes I have, more than once. Usually it's a very young person. I can't understand it being comfortable at all, yet safe.

What's a chucklehead?

I saw the driver of an 18-wheeler doing this in traffic. I have no idea how he was using his clutch.

The clutch just get's it rolling. After that, shifts are clutchless. At least that was the case the last time I drove one -- 30 years ago ;)

Heck we have a few auto shifts now. Manual trans but the computer does all the shifting. Just a brake and accelerator(gas pedal) no clutch pedal. Much prefer to shift myself. Clutch to roll and "float" the gears after that.

A few years back, someone was going down I-630 in Little Rock with a trash barrel behind their car. People in rural areas routinely hang them over their trailer balls and gently pull them to the road while going out on trash day. This person obviously forgot between the house and the road.

Those little wheels don't handle freeway speeds very well. What a mess! It's probably very luck nobody got hurt.

We were in the fire engine rolling lights and siren to a call when we got a call from dispatch that we were losing hose from the back of the rig. The engineer stops and tells me to check it out. When I went back the hose bed was empty. We took a lot of ribbing over that. It must have been quite a spectacle to see. Fortunately I was still a back seat rider and not the engineer or captain. Turned out to be a false alarm.