Nissan GT-R overtaking

[Gibson99]

of course these rules and laws all excludes emergencies. i drove several miles in the median of US highway 290 during the evacuation for hurricane rita. both westbound mainlanes and both shoulders were being used as normal lanes of traffic, and since the median was flat, and there was no curb, people made it into a 5th lane of traffic. it was also easier since all "lanes" were only doing 10-20 mph due to the massive amount of traffic. it made it a real b*tch to get over to the right when i needed to exit, but a hurricane evacuation is a slightly different scenario than what we see above.

key point here: nobody was driving on the wrong side of the road. we (thousands of evacuees) just converted the two westbound lanes + paved shoulders + some of the grassy median into five westbound lanes. the grass outside the right shoulder was too steep and was basically a ditch, so that's why there were only 5 lanes, not 6. nobody was crazy enough to completely cross teh median and drive the wrong way on the eastbound lanes, because for some reason there was still inbound traffic heading towards houston.

 

[reverend]

That is a very wide road - seeing as there are standard single carriageways (6-7m wide) and wide single carriageways (10m wide) they're designed to handle 3 abreast but that's assuming the outer two cars keep to the side of the road - some just sit in the middle.

You can see that by definition they were designed to allow three abreast:

http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=S2
http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=WS2

Some of the roads up this way have changed from WS2 to WS2+1, which is where you have two lanes designed to let people know overtaking is allowed with a single carriageway with a solid line preventing them from overtaking.