Well now I'm finally home, I'm going to rant about driving in Japan, again.
Speed limits are too low and nobody follows them, not even the police, 80km/h on a three lane toll highway? really bro?, during the day people were averaging 110, had to doubletake when cruising at 110 when a police car floated on by clearly doing in excess of 150, no lights flashing or anything, between 1am and 4am it's basically an autobahn, was driving tandem with a white GT4 RS at..... well, speeds you would not expect a GT86 to be doing, dude seemed amused that I could keep up
, fun was stopped when I had to split and merge onto another highway, where everyone was driving 90 in all lanes.
Then there were countless occasions where I'd pull into the fast lane to overtake someone doing under 80, and other drivers would randomly switch into the fast lane *way* too late or without even indicating and force me and whoever is behind me to brake hard. Then there's idiots doing 75 in the fast lane and refusing to move, then there's idiots weaving about in their lane so much that at one point a guy trying to overtake slammed on so hard he damn near lost it.
But the most frustratingly shitty thing is the Chuo expressway between Fujino and it's junction by Hachioji, every single weekend there are 6-8km long tailbacks because where the road switches from 3 lanes to 2 at the Keirinji shrine side, people seem incapable of doing so in a timely manner despite there being clear signage for the lane merge as far as 3km back, hell even when everyone is trundling along at 5kmh because of the jam, you still get absolute morons waiting till the last second to merge, which is the entire reason this tailback exists in the first place.
And that's been my experience in many places, both in japan and elsewhere, when you hit a block of slow moving traffic and pass through it never seeing a valid reason for it to even exist, back in the UK you would get the same whenever any sort of weather warning sign was showing, people would see it and slam on the brakes even though there's absolutely nothing different about the conditions they were only a few seconds earlier driving perfectly fine in.. people who have such immediate and blunt responses to any sort of signage will forever be the bane of my highway usage.
But mostly? mostly it's the insanely low speed limits, if almost nobody is going to follow them there is no point in them being so low, it just means the occasional person that does follow is at risk of being rear ended.
All it really does is make getting anywhere by car in Japan extremely time consuming, 300km should not take 4 hours, it should take 2 and a half at the most.
Also highway tolls are insane, the last leg i did this evening was 285km and the toll for that section was $88.20.