Biig trucks and those mountain "runaway truck lanes"

[AutobahnSHO]

kinda fun video/ discussion

http://jalopnik.com/terrifying-video-perfectly-explains-the-purpose-of-runa-1785975552

[Rupert]

I live next to Cabbage Hill, it was intimidating to drive it back in the day before I knew what I was doing. I see tracks in those decently often. They're very deep gravel. If you try to drive in one, you will get stuck. On ID 55, there is one that actually points downhill-- it's the deepness of the rocks that would stop you.

[AutobahnSHO]

The ones by Salt Lake City all go way uphill. I've never seen a truck in them, but I've smelled brakes going down there.

[MX793]

They put one of those gravel traps on a highway near where I grew up.  The road saw fairly heavy commercial truck traffic and was a long downhill that ended in a stoplight where the highway T'ed into another road.  If you went straight through the T, you ended up crashing into a large berm/retaining wall that protected a large corporate building.  Wasn't a super regular occurrence (less than once per year), but every so often a rig would lose its brakes and either flip trying to make the 90-degree turn at the T or just crash into the retaining wall.

Anyway, funny thing was that instead of calling it an emergency stop or runaway truck pull-off, all of the signs leading up to it called it a "controlled stop lane".  They had to drag a number of cars out of the gravel when it was first built because the signage did a poor job of conveying what the lane was and a lot of people naturally drifted to the right lane when the highway widened into two lanes about half a mile before the gravel trap and then ran right into the gravel pit.

[Soup DeVille]

Trucks going down a grade shouldn't be using their brakes at all; and if they are it's because they upshifted into too high a gear in the first place or because their jake brake isn't working, or they're in no gear at all.

All of which can be true at once, but most of the time it's because the trucker was trying to go too fast in the first place.

[AutobahnSHO]

True, probably happens when Trucker doesn't know the road or notice the signs.