Leo D.M.J. Aurini - March 24, 2015


Long-Haul Driving Advice

Topics
speeding
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Hatfields Alan
Nietzsche & the New Testament Part 2： Going Over or Under Aurini's Insight： On Prayer

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

152.45

Word count

2,381

Sentence count

175

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the dangers of sleeping on the side of the road while driving for long periods of time, and how to avoid getting pulled over by the cops for speeding. I also talk about why you should not be sleeping in your car while driving long distances.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This
00:00:29.980 requested video comes from Alan, who asks that I expound upon the topic of long-haul
00:00:37.440 driving. He actually had one specific question regarding sleeping at the side of the road,
00:00:43.000 but I think there's a number of other topics that are connected to this as well, so let's
00:00:48.360 just do all of them, since I can do this off the top of my head. Now, the very first principle,
00:00:54.940 if you are doing a long-haul drive across the country, you need to be serious about
00:01:00.840 this. What are you doing? You are driving. You know, this is not a summer trip with mom,
00:01:08.880 dad, and the kids, where you stop every hour or two for a pee break. If you are going to
00:01:14.000 be long-haul driving, then you need to discipline yourself to actually drive. The only time you
00:01:20.980 should be stopping and use the washroom is when your car needs more fuel. You can easily
00:01:27.520 waste half an hour at a roadside stop, and that's 30 miles. That's 50 kilometers. That's another
00:01:36.180 half hour you're adding to the tail end of your journey. If you're going to be driving,
00:01:41.100 you need to be serious about it. Do not take breaks. You know, get yourself a big coffee,
00:01:46.520 get yourself something you can eat while you're driving, and then get back on the road and keep
00:01:51.400 moving. You know, you're only going to be alert and awake for so many hours. If you waste some
00:01:59.540 of that time sitting at a roadside stop, well, you're not going to get there.
00:02:05.260 Now, obviously, take breaks if you need them, particularly in bad weather. Like, I was driving
00:02:14.220 through the snowpocalypse, and it took me about eight hours to move 150 miles. And that's because
00:02:20.640 the weather was so bad, you know, that first of all, I wasn't doing very fast on the highway,
00:02:25.340 but also I was taking plenty of breaks just because of the amount of attention that was required just to
00:02:32.340 drive safely was a lot. So, if you need to take breaks, take breaks. But don't take breaks because
00:02:39.140 you're lazy. Now, following from that, speeding. If you're driving for 6 to 12 hours straight,
00:02:50.800 going about 10 miles over the limit, that is a huge difference at the end of the day. You can more
00:02:59.100 than cancel out all of your gas stops if you are serious and disciplined and you go a little bit
00:03:06.820 over the limit. Now, I generally find in most states, you can safely do 10 over the limit. You know,
00:03:16.300 maybe even 15 in some places. One exception is Texas. If you're driving through Texas, I would not do
00:03:26.100 above more than 5 over the limit. Set the cruise control there and just let her go. 1.00
00:03:34.380 Now, when you are driving over the limit like this, you should be basically faster than 99% of the traffic
00:03:42.640 that you see. For every 99 cars that you pass, one maniac should pass you. Then you know you're in that
00:03:52.380 sweet spot. You're not the craziest driver on the road, but you're still, you've got an edge on just
00:03:57.520 about everybody else. If you see a cop at the side of the road, or rather when you see a cop at the
00:04:06.880 side of the road, because you will if you're driving for long enough, your first instinct is going to be
00:04:13.180 to hit the brakes and slow down. Do not do this. That makes you look guilty.
00:04:21.900 See, the cop has already clocked how fast you're going. They've already got their radar. As soon as
00:04:26.300 you see, the radar sees you before you see the cop. So you've already been caught. The crime isn't going to
00:04:33.320 get any worse. So if you see the cop, do not slow down. Pure psychology. It makes you look guilty if
00:04:40.680 you slow down. The cop is more inclined as if he sees your brake lights hit. You look like, you look
00:04:47.000 like, oh, I feel guilty. I was doing something wrong. It pisses him off, makes him want to pull you over.
00:04:53.960 Don't hit the brakes. Just keep doing what you're doing. And as long as it's a reasonable amount that
00:05:00.360 you're doing over the limit, you shouldn't have any problems. I never have.
00:05:11.320 If you do get pulled over, however, and seriously, I can't emphasize this enough. If you get pulled
00:05:17.560 over by a cop for speeding, be polite to the guy. 90% of speeding tickets are asshole taxes. 0.99
00:05:25.240 If you act like a mouthy idiot, if you start being rude to him, then yeah, he's going to give you a 1.00
00:05:32.040 ticket just for being a jerk. If you're polite and respectful, you call him officer or sir. 1.00
00:05:40.360 You know, you don't admit everything. Like when you speak to the cops, never give them information
00:05:47.400 that they don't already have. Never volunteer information. Because again,
00:05:50.840 they're not your friend. Officer friendly is something that disappeared 50 years ago.
00:05:55.960 So don't ever mistake a cop for officer friendly. But at the same time, the majority of them,
00:06:01.960 they are decent guys. We just have a really screwed up legal system. So if you're polite,
00:06:07.240 if you are civil, they will likely let you off with a warning.
00:06:11.320 All right, so the next part. Sleeping at the side of the road.
00:06:23.240 One thing that is absolutely maddening is spending the money on hotels and motels when you're traveling.
00:06:33.160 I don't like doing it. It's an unnecessary luxury.
00:06:36.520 Um, I'm just sitting in the car. You know, it's not like I've been doing manual labor. It's not like I
00:06:43.160 stink. I can go a couple of days without a shower. And it's not like I'm going to be appearing in public
00:06:47.800 or anything like that. Why would I possibly pay, you know, 50 or 100 bucks for a hotel room?
00:06:54.440 Yeah, I absolutely hate doing that. But unfortunately, it's not the 1850s anymore.
00:07:01.640 There's, um, an HBO series. I think it was HBO, the Hatfields and McCoys, where one of the young men
00:07:11.080 with the, the, the feud going on between the two families just gets sick of it and says,
00:07:16.360 you know what? I'm done. I'm moving to Oregon. And he just jumps on his horse and he leaves.
00:07:23.240 And where is he? He sleeps on the ground, wherever he wants, until he gets to Oregon.
00:07:27.240 We don't live in those days anymore. The thing is that if you're at the side of the road,
00:07:33.080 sleeping in your car, you look very suspicious, particularly since your license plate is probably
00:07:39.640 out of state or out of province. You know, the, as you're driving there, hey, there's decent odds
00:07:45.640 that if you're driving, I had this several times when I was in New Jersey, you'll get a cop that notices
00:07:51.720 that you have an out of state plate and they'll just pull up behind you and they'll run your
00:07:56.120 plate to see if it's a stolen vehicle or to see whatever. You know, you look suspicious with these
00:08:02.600 plates. So when you're driving across country and you've got this suspicious plate and you're
00:08:08.600 stopped at the side of the road and you know, who knows, maybe you drove until 2am. So it's 10 in the
00:08:13.640 morning. All the civilized people are already at work. And here's this lazy vagrant sleeping at the
00:08:18.600 side of the road. You know, you, you look heat when that happens.
00:08:25.720 And so generally it is safer if you can afford it to get motels because nobody bugs somebody
00:08:30.760 that's staying at a hotel or a motel. The fact that you can afford it shows that you're not a
00:08:35.320 vacant. It shows that you didn't steal the car, etc. You know, that might not actually be true
00:08:40.360 realistically speaking, but psychologically. Guy staying at a hotel versus guy sleeping at the side
00:08:46.840 of the road. Who's going to get harassed first? But if you don't want to stay at the hotels,
00:08:55.240 which, you know, I fully endorse, you've got a couple of options. The first is roadside turnoffs.
00:09:03.880 These are mainly used by long haul truckers. And it's, I know it's ironic that being pulled over the
00:09:11.800 side of the highway looks suspicious, but being pulled over to the side of a rest area doesn't.
00:09:18.440 I mean, it's the same thing really at the end of the day. But if you're, if you're there with the
00:09:22.920 truckers, you're also hidden by the large trucks. You're just a person that's moving across the
00:09:29.560 country or you're just, whatever. You're, you're a professional. This is what you're doing. You just
00:09:33.640 have a really long drive. People leave you alone. Most states in the United States have welcome
00:09:41.320 centers at the edge of each state. So as you cross the state line, there'll be a sign saying,
00:09:47.800 welcome center in three miles. And it has, it's got some vending machines. It's got tourist information
00:09:54.440 about everything, but also has places that you can park for the evening. So that's another solution,
00:10:01.320 stopping at one of those. But the third situation, and this is what I ran into when I was in Texas,
00:10:11.640 is I couldn't find any roadside turnoffs for semi-drivers. And it happens to be a very,
00:10:17.560 very large state, it turns out, even though the way the map is shaped, it doesn't look that big.
00:10:24.120 So what do you do in that case? Now, if you pull over the side of the highway,
00:10:28.920 everyone's going to see you. You know, everybody that drives past, you know, there's that car
00:10:36.520 at the side of the highway. You look suspicious.
00:10:41.480 However, if you look for it, you will eventually find county roads, side roads, dirt roads.
00:10:52.360 And the majority of these dirt roads are very, very frequently unused. So what you want to do,
00:11:03.320 if it's getting late and you're getting tired, and the sun is set, is find one of these roads,
00:11:08.920 preferably with another little turnoff next to it. And you will frequently find these places where you
00:11:14.840 can, you can cozy up your car onto the side of the road so that you're in no way blocking traffic,
00:11:20.440 you're well off the highway. And in fact, anybody driving on the highway or on the dirt roads,
00:11:27.480 they're not going to see you. Keep in mind, when you're driving at night,
00:11:31.800 you have the cone of light in front of you, and everything else is pitch black. You know,
00:11:37.640 you have oncoming vehicles on the other side of the highway, and that those headlights kill your
00:11:42.920 night vision. So if you pull over, like, you could try it. You pull over to the side of the road,
00:11:48.840 get out of your car, look around. You can actually see things, you know, just from the stars, the moon.
00:11:53.880 But when you're on the road, anything aside from the shoulders is pitch darkness.
00:12:01.960 So if you can't find anywhere else to sleep at the side of the road, these are good locations.
00:12:07.160 You know, on the side of a dirt road, you know, go a little distance away from the main drag, nobody is
00:12:13.320 going to see you. And just look at the road itself. Does it look well traveled? Are there ruts in it?
00:12:20.760 Or is it a forgotten road that only three farmers use? Use your instincts for this. You know, is there,
00:12:29.480 better yet, if there's a rail, if there's a rail line, and the crossing is not controlled, then you
00:12:36.120 know it's not a very high traffic area. You can safely go there and lay back in your car and crash
00:12:43.160 until the sun comes up. Nobody's going to notice you.
00:12:50.760 And finally, a bit of advice for when you are staying at hotels, when you're traveling,
00:12:56.200 you're staying at a hotel. The very first thing you should do when you get in is unpack your stuff.
00:13:03.640 You know, not all of it. You don't need to take your socks and underwear and put them in the
00:13:07.160 dresser. Who cares about that? That can all stay in the luggage. But if you have suits with you,
00:13:14.760 pull them out, hang them up, so they don't crinkle. Get your toiletries and bring them into the
00:13:22.280 washroom. You know, get the shoes out of your bed. Get everything organized. Discipline yourself to do
00:13:27.800 this as soon as you check in, because it's just good for the psychology. It puts you in a better
00:13:33.160 state if everything, if you know where everything is, if it's all organized. It's keeping yourself
00:13:39.240 disciplined, because if you keep your place tidy, you will keep your mind tidy. And one last little
00:13:47.400 thing about luggage, try putting a dryer sheet in with your luggage when you travel. One of my,
00:13:58.040 one of the things that really bothers me, because I smoke, is I will sometimes unpack my luggage,
00:14:04.760 and if I forgot to put the dryer sheet in, it will just, the whole thing will just reek of cigarette
00:14:08.600 smoke, even though all of this laundry just came out of the the washing machine. You know, being cramped
00:14:13.800 up in a suitcase is not good for your clothes. It really kills the freshness. But if you toss a
00:14:19.720 dryer sheet in there, it will keep them smelling fresh.
00:14:27.160 So I think that's about everything. If you are traveling northern routes, however, and if you plan
00:14:33.160 to be traveling a lot at night, it is definitely worth your time to get a jerry can full of gasoline
00:14:39.480 and put that in your trunk. Because there's a lot of places, especially at night, where there are no
00:14:45.320 gas stations that are open. And a lot of these places still take cash. So having a, and as well,
00:14:51.960 if you're going to leave your car on while you're sleeping, there is very slim. Like if you just fueled
00:14:57.480 up, it should be fine. Idling a car really doesn't take that much energy. But there is a very slim
00:15:02.440 possibility that you could run out of gas. So having a jerry can in your back, in your trunk is a very
00:15:09.240 good idea. Anyway, I hope that was useful. Drive safely. Irini out. 0.98
00:15:32.440 I'm