I noticed it at least twice Saturday night coming home from our daughter’s place.
First, a little history.
Our first vehicle with cruise control was an International Scout Traveler that we bought in 1977. I really liked that feature. Without it, since I did most of the driving, driving long distances could literally be a pain with constantly having to control the engine throttle with your foot.
Our next car, a Dodge Colt, didn’t have it. When we bought a second vehicle in 1982, I actually installed cruise control—and it worked!
On one of our first long interstate trips in it, we noticed we would see the same vehicles over and over again. That used to be pretty normal back when cruise control wasn’t common, but for some reason, on this trip, since our speed was very constant, it was more apparent. Some of the vehicles would blast past us and, a few miles down the road, would come upon them dawdling along only to have them blast past us again at some point later on.
Rinse and repeat. Over and over.
I took to calling them hurry-up-go-slows.
We haven’t seen that so much in recent years since most vehicles now have cruise control. With near-constant speed, once you pass a car or truck or it passes you on the interstate, they’re gone and forgotten.
Usually.
Saturday night, there were two of them on I40, both trucks, one soon after we got on the interstate, the other later. We would pass them and then, shortly after, there they were again.
One of them for way too long matched my speed, sitting on my left in my blind spot. I slowed down to let him get a ways ahead before resuming on the speed control. Not long afterward, there he was again going quite a bit slower. As I passed him, he sped up and paced us a couple of car lengths back in the right lane for several miles until he came up behind another car going a bit slower, where he stayed, pacing them, I guess.
The second one was a left-lane hog. Even though it is now against the law to drive in the leftmost lane except for passing or where the road surface is bad in the right lane(s)1, a lot of people still tend to stay in the left lane, though most will move over when a faster vehicle approaches from the rear. This one didn’t so I passed on the right. Of course, a while later, here he came again. A few minutes, there he was again, this time going slower in the right lane. After repeating this a time or two more, I dropped our speed a couple of miles an hour. Didn’t see him again after I resumed speed.
Hurry up, go slow.
- This is a very new law. Previously, the law required that drivers move to the right to allow faster traffic to pass. Now it supposedly prohibits travel in the left-most lane of a multi-lane highway except to pass.
