I was on an expressway going North through Chicago doing 75 in one of the center lanes and they were blowing by me on both sides like I was standing still, even though traffic was coming to a dead stop at almost every exit and entrance.
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Where I’m at . . . California, in case some didn’t know by now . . . I see VERY few commercial vehicles actually driving 55mph
I have a cdl and drive 55mph when driving such a vehicle for my job,but I look around and see very few others doing the same
I regularly see tractor trailer combinations doing at least 70 . . . well above the 55mph they’re in fact supposed to be doing
Greyhound bus drivers have a schedule to meet and are informally told to drive at whatever speed needed to get there on time.
Having ridden a Greyhounds bus from time to tine I was impressed at they way the divers kept pace without any discomfort to the passengers.
It’s not the Greyhound bus drivers I was thinking of
It’s usually the tractor trailer combinations going so fast, you have to be going 80 just to pass them
I have not seen a greyhound bus for year’s did not know they were still around.
Here in NH and northern MA they’d be run off the road. Stay off of my road.
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Let me add something to those instances concerning the highway patrol officers pulling behind a slow poke
They also specifically say in almost these exact words “You’re holding everybody up” or You’re slowing everybody down"
I’m talking about slowpokes who cause a long line of vehicles behind them, and they’re causing a dangerous situation, because those guys behind them have to figure out a way to pass the slow poke, without getting clobbered by the guys in the neighboring lanes, who are going much faster
If your speed . . . or lack thereof . . . is causing a dangerous situation, you should get off the freeway. If you’re too slow even for the far right lane, get off at the next exit
Is that clear enough by now . . . ?!
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I’ve ridden Greyhound myself. I was less impressed with the driver’s ability to fall asleep while driving at 70 mph. He was halfway onto the shoulder from the right lane when I yelled at him (I happened to be sitting right behind him) to wake him up.
The worst part of riding in a Greyhound is being woken up in the middle of the night so they can clean the bus, being forced out onto a public bench with all your belongings in the dead of night, often in the worst part of town.
9 out of 10 Greyhound stations are in the part of town most people avoid. The only time they’re located in a decent part of town is when you’re in a town that doesn’t have bad side of the tracks.
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I would get 40+ mpg in my Geo Metro in the 1990s. GM took over the model and economy dropped by 10 mpg. My 280ZX got 37mpg, going from Lake Tahoe to Sacramento. LOL
All downhill, too. Did you coast the whole way? 
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I had two Corvair convertibles in the 60’s and, while I don’t recall checking mpg (the days of cheap gasoline), I think 30mpg is credible.
BTW, driving them was fun, and safe, once I had rear sway bars installed. I think people who had trouble “controlling” them were unaware that rear-engine cars drive differently. Having earlier owned Renault Dauphines, I had no problems.
If you want to win a sucker bet, the next time someone claims he averages 75 mph on a long road trip, challenge him to prove it using distance covered vs time to get there. Challenge him reach a destination 750 mile away from here in 10 hours.
On some other forum, there were people making some outlandish gas mileage claims for a particular model of motorcycle. When they said “petrol” instead of “gasoline”, I asked “you’re in Great Britain, right?”, well, that explained it. All vehicles get better gas mileage in Great Britain than they do in the U.S. (Google “imperial gallon”)
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It does seem to be very common for people to overstate their gas mileage, and to drastically understate their travel time. When I was a kid, my parents had a friend, Bob, who got a new job in a town that was about 35 miles away.
My father–who could tell you how to get almost anywhere in the state w/o looking at a road map–asked Bob how long his commute was. Bob said, “20 minutes”.
Knowing that Bob rarely took his Rambler American over 40 mph, and also that he avoided toll roads, my father asked him to describe his route. Bob proceeded to describe the extremely circuitous route (complete with lots of traffic lights and traffic congestion) that was necessary if one was to avoid toll roads.
The bottom line was that Bob’s chosen route to work would have meant a minimum of one hour travel time, but he insisted that it took him only 20 minutes.
Maybe he had a time machine.
My Garmin Navigator displays an ETA to my destination. Even a fast bathroom break rolls back that ETA by about 5 minutes. The least ETA loss comes if you take your bathroom break in a station that is on a road with a low speed limit. The Garmin does not time your pit stop, it times your pit stop delta, which includes the time lost driving slow on pit road and accelerating back to cruise speed. It’s why racers do their best to pit during a yellow flag. Exiting a freeway, driving a mile on an access road, parking, and then waiting for traffic at a stop sign before you can reenter the freeway is a pit stop disaster.
The 2020 Cannonball Run speed record will likely never be equalled because there won’t be another covid-19 lockdown to give the driver an empty freeway to drive on. Nothing reduced my transit time to work more than the lockdown.
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When I was still working that is like some of the science fiction I have at time’s written in my log book.
In some severely congested cities, bicycles are actually faster than cars. That’s why downtown NYC has bicycle couriers everywhere.
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Got into an argument with a friend in the Air Force about his car. He had a 1970 Chevelle Malibu with the 307. He claims he swapped out the 307 rods for 327 rods and made his engine a 302. I tried to explain to him that the 307 and the 327 had the same stroke (3.25 in.) and that even if he swapped crankshafts he’d still have a 307. He said I was stupid for saying so and didn’t know what I was talking about.
For the record: bore v stroke for: 302 is 4.00 x 3.00 (Chevy)
307 is 3.875 x 3.00
327 is 4.00 x 3.25
My dad had a 1992 Dodge Ram 3/4 ton with the Cummins diesel and the full Bates upgrades. He drove it from Sacramento, CA. to Charleston, W.Va. and back twice. He told me he averaged about 24 mpg for both trips and made 29 mpg for one tank. I know diesels can get good mileage if they’re not driven hard, so I couldn’t really say.
You had it right in the text but missed it here.
307 is 3.875 bore and 3.25 stroke. 283 block with a 327s crankshaft
The rods are 5.7 inches for the 302, 307, 327 and 283. Really all but the 400