Regardless of how well prepared you are to comfortably hunker down in your vehicle, unless you're truly in no mans land without any reachable alternatives for shelter, it's best to lock up the vehicle with a note on the dash and make your way to a shelter out of harms way. Preferably by way of a route that is not along the road, even if it's more difficult.
It's never safe to be arbitrarily stopped on a road, even if you're on the shoulder. Even if you're under the impression no other vehicles will be going fast enough to not see your vehicle or cause an energetic crash. The last thing you want is to be sleeping in your stuck vehicle when a jack-knifed semi takes the roof off.
Unless I know I'm going to be in extremely isolated/rural areas, I prefer to be equipped for a hiking excursion more than a prolonged unplanned car-camping scenario. A stuck car on a thoroughfare is a very unsafe place to be, especially in slippery/poor-vis. conditions.
Just a note for locations actually not varying that much and this is generally terrible advice: people die of exposure doing this in the US and everyone ever asked from search and rescue will tell you to stay in your car unless it is actively going underwater or falling off a cliff.
It's qualified with unless you're genuinely isolated and there's no reasonably accessible shelter away from traffic.
i.e. If you're stuck on the shoulder of a snowy/icy highway and there's a walking distance Motel 6 visible, go straight to the hotel and make your phone calls there. A road is a terrible place to camp, your occupancy has zero influence on the probability of the vehicle getting hit, though it may feel like the right/responsible thing to do - to not abandon your vehicle, it's rarely the safe choice when the stop was unplanned.
This is still really bad advice. There was a recent instance not a year ago where folks were stuck with 3 feet of snow at night on an interstate interchange. Yes there was a hotel not a mile from where they were but getting out of your car to cross the interstate in 3 feet of snow is a great way to get hit or get lost in the blizzard and get some good hypothermia. Compare this to staying in their car where they were picked up by highway patrol in a snow cat a few hours later and taken to a shelter. And its not some stroke of luck either, highway patrol knows to go look for people in their cars with the snow cat and do it nearly every year. They do not know to look for you in a drift of snow over the side of the highway.
For every anecdote you can provide of someone being careless on foot I can find multiple instances of a stopped vehicle being smashed into on a highway.
Now we even have the pleasure of anticipating Tesla Autopilot to plow into us while stopped on the shoulder, apparently made even more likely if there's an emergency vehicle present.
I didn't disagree that sometimes it makes sense to get out of your vehicle if the road is all iced up and one is worried about a trucker crushing into you due to fog. Rather I'm more refuting the following statement:
> unless you're truly in no mans land without any reachable alternatives for shelter, it's best to lock up the vehicle with a note on the dash and make your way to a shelter out of harms way
The presence of anecdotes that conflict each other is evidence that it is hard to make blanket statements like the above although I would still argue that the default should be stay in or near your vehicle during winter weather related emergencies. Also any anecdotes about AI related disasters are off topic ;)
If there is this much confusion in a online community like this about what to do in such situations, either
a more thorough study needs to be done by the Feds or
a better job communicating what definitive study results recommend, with easy rules of thumb like “if you can see the lights of a shelter on the road from your vehicle and you haven’t seen a vehicle on the road in the last hour, then walk to the shelter’.
Where I'm at in the Midwest, that light could be miles away. It's really not possible to make a one-size-fits-all recommendation.
For what it's worth, every time I've seen first responders talk about adverse weather conditions, they say to stay with the vehicle if possible. Obviously if you're on the interstate outside of Los Angeles, you probably want to get the heck off the roadway no matter what. But if you're lost or trapped, a vehicle is much easier to spot than a pedestrian. If you're lucky enough that there's helicopters looking for you, being near the vehicle is going to drastically reduce the time it takes to find you.
You've drifted off topic, and started giving advice about "vehicle broken down on active highway" which isn't the scenario being discussed.
Yes, getting off the highway makes sense if you are in a disabled vehicle on an active highway, assuming there is something solid to shield you from the vehicles/debris that goes flying when your car is hit.
No, getting out of your car in a winter storm when all traffic is halted due to the conditions does not make sense at all.
Getting out of your car on an active highway is actually much more likely to kill you than staying in it - you instantly go from a big, strong noticeable metal cage (hopefully with flashing lights on) to a small, soft, very fragile person. People who don't see a car on the shoulder also don't see a person walking.
>However, more than half the deaths and almost 1 in 5 serious injuries occur when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian who is leaving, working on, or returning to a stopped vehicle.
Is a breakdown of the different groups available?
• Leaving
• Working on
• Returning to
I agree that groups 2 and 3 are to be strongly encouraged against.
Group 1, choosing to leave your vehicle and stand off the road, behind solid infrastructure, is actively reducing their risk, albeit at the tradeoff of being briefly exposed to traffic.
I wouldn't recommend anyone exit a vehicle into fast moving traffic. For my comment above, I condsidered adding "if a suitable break in the traffic appears", but I decided it was overly wordy and to some extent self-evident.
> They found that 95 percent of these inconspicuous-vehicle crashes occur when a vehicle traveling down the roadway collides with a stationary one. However, more than half the deaths and almost 1 in 5 serious injuries occur when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian who is leaving, working on, or returning to a stopped vehicle. On average, this type of crash kills 300 pedestrians a year, a number that has risen by more than a quarter since 2014.
> The last thing you want is to be sleeping in your stuck vehicle when a jack-knifed semi takes the roof off.
That’s relevant to a car breaking down, but not so much in the middle of a long line of stuck traffic. The cars behind you are going to prevent anything from hitting your car at high speeds. Meanwhile getting out early can be quite dangerous.
> Regardless of how well prepared you are to comfortably hunker down in your vehicle, unless you're truly in no mans land without any reachable alternatives for shelter, it's best to lock up the vehicle with a note on the dash and make your way to a shelter out of harms way.
Nah, cars have climate control and can generate DC power for electronics for many hours at idle. Best to stay in the vehicle.
It's never safe to be arbitrarily stopped on a road, even if you're on the shoulder. Even if you're under the impression no other vehicles will be going fast enough to not see your vehicle or cause an energetic crash. The last thing you want is to be sleeping in your stuck vehicle when a jack-knifed semi takes the roof off.
Unless I know I'm going to be in extremely isolated/rural areas, I prefer to be equipped for a hiking excursion more than a prolonged unplanned car-camping scenario. A stuck car on a thoroughfare is a very unsafe place to be, especially in slippery/poor-vis. conditions.