I'd imagine it's because it takes so much effort and gas to asymptote up to 40mph or whatever, that they can't fathom electing to stop and do it all again. Most tractor trailers have a large enough engine to handle going up hills with common cargo at highway speeds (exceptions exist, of course). From what I've observed, most RV's just don't.
I spent several months living out of my car+tent in national parks/forests and often referred to them as Ruins Views. Breathtaking scenery in those national parks, that you can't focus on when you're stuck in a line of twenty cars riding your brakes and smelling theirs, because Big Bob doesn't want to get his tippy palace going too fast.
I do get the appeal, but lugging around so much tonnage seems like a recipe for a bad time. Now I'm at a different life stage where I've been doing a bunch of towing with an underpowered SUV, and I make it a point to get out of peoples' ways. Luckily most of that has been on multilane highways where it's easy to do so.
If you’re driving you just can’t focus on scenery period, no matter how many cars you’re stuck behind. Whenever I ride as a passenger on roads I drive every day, I’m amazed at the details outside that I don’t see when I’m driving.
Just keeping a car on a road with no traffic takes a fair amount of focus: for evidence, just see how many people don’t do it and plow into objects that are alongside the road.
These kind of comments trying to invoke some tangential hobby horse ("safe driving") by taking a word out of context are soooo web forum.
Obviously, driving requires attention and is always one's main focus. Having driven various sizes of vehicles, it's quite clear that this amount of attention varies. For example, the sheer amount of work required to drive a 26 foot box truck gave me a healthy respect for truck drivers. On the original topic, I'd imagine a lot of RV drivers don't pull over or are actively hostile to being passed because they're so overwhelmed they don't want to pile on any more requirements. And while this means that they should be taking the opportunity to stop and recover, try telling someone who is drowning to stop thrashing.
Piloting a 2500 lb manual coupe barefoot in a non-wooded area on an empty road requires the lowest amount of work I've experienced. Driving that same car while having to continually gauge how hard the person in front of you is applying the brakes takes much more. Braking extra and creating more buffer room gives a slight reprieve, but at the ailing speeds ruined views tend to go on non-straight roads you'll inevitably catch right back up.
The person driving the RV that you're complaining about has just as much right to enjoy the national park as you do. My point is that if you want to enjoy the scenery, you need to get out of the driver's seat.
> The person driving the RV that you're complaining about has just as much right to enjoy the national park as you do
This makes no sense. If someone was blasting a trunk-shaking car stereo and I was complaining about that instead, would you say they had just as much right to "enjoy the national park" ? How about someone using a dirtbike on a trail? The way we keep these things enjoyable is by setting standards. And the examples that come to mind are roads where the prevailing speed was something like 35-40mph, but these big rigs were clogging them up at 15-20mph.
> My point is that if you want to enjoy the scenery, you need to get out of the driver's seat.
This is obviously false. Even the park maps point out scenic driving routes.
I spent several months living out of my car+tent in national parks/forests and often referred to them as Ruins Views. Breathtaking scenery in those national parks, that you can't focus on when you're stuck in a line of twenty cars riding your brakes and smelling theirs, because Big Bob doesn't want to get his tippy palace going too fast.
I do get the appeal, but lugging around so much tonnage seems like a recipe for a bad time. Now I'm at a different life stage where I've been doing a bunch of towing with an underpowered SUV, and I make it a point to get out of peoples' ways. Luckily most of that has been on multilane highways where it's easy to do so.