Let me set the mood...

A friend of mine guilt tripped me into driving 100 miles to my hometown in Jersey for a Pool party/BBQ on Sat. As i'm driving along I-295 N, in the left hand lane, I notice a guy in an Accord with a couple of bikes on his bike rack. I don't think anything of it because I've driven on highways behind folks with bike racks attached to their cars before and nothing major has ever happened.

All of a sudden, one of his bikes flies off the back of his car and starts hurling unpredictably towards me. The first thing I do is look to my right to see another car driving directly along side of me, I'm thinkin he has to see the bike hurling towards me but instead of moving to his right into the empty lane he continues to go straight slowing down at the exact same rate as me and leaving me only two options.

1) I swerve to side swipe the jerk next to me and miss the bike completely then face the insurance mess to follow.

or

2) Try to swerve just enough to miss both the on coming bike and the guy next to me.

I pick the later and swerve the best that I can to avoid both obstacles. Unfortunately, I'm not as good a driver as I thought I was and the bike comes slaming into the fender on my drivers side. It takes off my side view mirror and continues down the highway.

The owner of the bike realizes what has just happened and pulls over to a scenic overlook area, we exchange information, he apologizes, and were off on our merry way.

The plus is that I didn't get killed and the damage isn't that bad. Also when I got to the BBQ I demanded the biggest peice of chicken there and got it! A few minutes later I saw some old friends who made the same great desicion as I did and bought a TSX. Mine was the only one with NAVI though...

 

You gotta take driving lessons from Dan.

 

one of those freak accidents...glad to hear nothing serious happened

 

I hate people who see an impending accident and instead of making an effort to get out of your way, they just kinda get in your way. I also hate people who don't properly secure things to their cars the their shit ends up all over the highway.

 

VTECLuvaLuva, sorry to hear about the mishap. Unfortunately it sounds like you were following a little too close to the car ahead of you. In theory you should always leave enough space to stop if something happens to the car you are following.
Luckily, it sounds like your car can be repaired good as new and thankfully nobody was injured.

 

But it wasn't the car that stopped in front, an object was coming TOWARDS him. If the bike has just fallen off and stopped I'd agree he was following closely but in that case its difficult to suggest he may have been follwoing closely IMO.

 

 

friend of my crashed his Jetta into the divider trying to avoid a fecking flying ladder blown off a van.

 

Sorry I misread that...

 

Yea, I was a pretty good distance behind him, I have to admit I was cruising at about 75 mph though. I would have gotten clear of it had I been able to move to my right just a little bit more.

 

Hmm, and exactly how did the bike come toward him when its departing velocity was 60 mph in the exact opposite direction? Perhaps you have discovered a new law of physics?

 

WTF?

Opposite direction? Where in his post does it say the car was going in the opposite direction? It does say the bike was coming towards him and that the car with the bike's was in the left lane, doesn't say left lane in the other direction. So I'm not sure what the hell your talking about?

EDIT: And he stated that he was not following too closely so I think that would indicate he was behind the vehicle that lost the bike? Can you confirm Vtecluva?

 

If he was following too closely he would have straight up rammed the bike!

Ive always wondered if some poor dude got stuck behind one of those guys where a bike came off..

 

All things being equal you would think that the brakes on the TSX (or any car for that matter) would slow the car down faster than any flying object being slowed by air or the ground alone.

 

It's not. I just went slower due to air resitance/drag.

Figure if he was going 75 mph, and the bike slowed to 50mph, you have 25 mph closure.

 

The situation as I understand it is this.

He was following a car that had bikes strapped on top. One of the bikes flew off. Now if I'm not mistaken, that would cause the bike to come TOWARDS him since he was follwoing. Or am I misunderstanding the situation? Now I understand what Jimby means by the bike going in the opposite direction. If Vtec Luva was going North for example then the bike would have been going South, but is that not still headed towards him??

 

If the bike falls of the back of a car, it will still retain the velocity of the forward momentum of the car. Hitting the pavement will slow it down substantially, but it will still be traveling in the forward direction. Try dropping a rock out of moving car and you will see it roll and bounce in the direction of travel.

So the bike was not coming toward him; rather he was rapidly overtaking the decelerating bike, which was traveling in the same direction that he was.

It is a subject of debate whether he was following too close to stop or avoid. Since none of us were there, it's hard to make that determination.

Now if the bike had crossed lanes into his lane, that would have been a truly unpredictable occurence.

 

Actually. If the bicycle falls off its speed is going to slow down dramatically as the car it fell off of continues its path. The car following would be speeding towards it. Not the other way around. Sorry to hear about your accident, though. I was actually thinking while driving on the GW Bridge last night that I've never heard of anyone getting hit by a bicycle strapped to a car. Geez. Hope everything turns out ok in the end.

 

Beat me to it! Dangit!

 

I'm

So say for example he was travelling North

---------------------------->

and the car with the bike was also travelling north

----------------------------->

When the bike fell off it also went North

------------------------------> ??

 

Yep. Exactly!

 

I have to try that rock thing on the way home.

The bike had no forward momentum so I still can't see how it would have carried forward especially after hitting the ground?

 

It absolutely had forward momentum. It was traveling 60mph.

Try this. With your car parked, open the passenger's door and jump out.

Now try the same thing in a car traveling at 60mph. You will probably roll for 200 feet!

 

I'll be sure to do that on the way home.

Sure I'd roll for 200 feet but wouldn't I roll in the opposite direction of the car?

I'm still damn I'll have to do some testing on the way home. I can't see anything but a tire that already had forward momemtum rolling the same direction of the car after its fallen off.

 

You wouldn't roll BACKWARD. You would roll forward. Of course you would be traveling slower than the car you jumped out of, so that car would leave you behind, but you both would be traveling in the same direction.

 

I just tested the theory by walking forward briskly through a conference room and keeping my arms straight, dropped a coin and sure enough the coin bounced forward.



EDIT: btw the conference room was empty.

 

Think of it this way.

The car is travelling north at 60 mph.

You jump out. Due to wind resistance and skin-pavement friction, you rapidly decelerate from 60 mph to 0.

So, relative to the car, yes you're travelling the opposite way. Relative to the ground, you still travel north until your bloody corpse stops moving.

In a post act, VTECLUVAs TSX runs over you and continues your path north a bit.

 

:gheywave: this reminds me of math word problems from high school.. heheh

"two trains leave the station at 3:00PM .. one is travelling 60 mph....."

 

Two trains leave the station at 3:00pm. One is travelling south at 60 mph. The other is travelling north at 80mph.

Who paid the highest fare?

LOL!

 

Or, you can think of it this way: When you are travelling say 60mph and then hit something, the car stops almost immediately. Where are you going to go? Toward the windshield. You are travelling the same direction and speed of the car. When you hit something, it's the car's movement that is stopped, not yours.

When something falls off/out of a car, it is still moving in its original direction (forward). It seems to move backward relative to the car because it loses speed while the car does not. When you are travelling behind the car the the thing fell out/off of, then it seems as if the object is coming toward you. It is not, you're just going way faster than it is.

 

Its making sense now, thanks gents.

 

The hospital?

 

Here ya go:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/62936.html

A passenger on a train traveling at 135 km/h walks toward the back of
the train at a rate of 7 km/h. What is the passenger's rate of travel
with respect to the ground?

 

well that pretty much shut down this thread!

 

Well it's nice to see you guys figured it out, I was too discouraged to get into that this morning

 

Man, this sucks...I missed the whole discussion, I've got to check my email more often during the day!!!

My college physics teacher is probably sick from the way I described it. But who would think to turn this thread into one big physics discussion....Jimby!!!

 

You would be traveling in the same direction and at the same speed as your car until you departed it. As soon as you left the car you'd begin to slow down. You would still be traveling in the same direction.

First, air resistance would begin to slow you down. (Think of the parachutes that slow down a rail dragster from 300mph.) Then, when you fall enough to make contact with the pavement, friction will begin to slow you down. Compare the area of surface contact (per pound) of your skidding body with the tire "footprint" of a TSX (per pound). Since your body will have a much greater contact area (per pound), you should come to rest in a shorter distance than the following TSX is able to stop using it's brakes. So, after you contact the pavement and bounce a few times, your lifeless corpus would likely then be smashed by the following TSX, even if Mr. VTECLuvaLuva has his ABS fully engaged!

Back to the world of "Practical Physics", I drove up the GSP and NY Thruway to deposit my kid back in college this past weekend and I was awed as to how insecurely many vehicles had bicycles secured. Yes, I can see exactly how the original incident occurred!

 

That's hilarious! Most likely, yes. Or the grave.

 

This thread was too funny... my wife thought I was nuts for laughing at the computer.