Road trains are fucking massive. They take a long time to pass even if you break the speed limit by 20 km/h, and they obscure your view of the road quite substantially. It’s near impossible for a driver to safely pass a road train without the truckie’s assistance on some roads. The fact that drivers mostly know truckies will do this means they are less likely to attempt an unsafe overtake which could endanger both them and the truckie.

On country roads it is a lot less stressful for you and the trucker if you have a cb radio. You don’t need a massive areal and all wired in, just a little handheld for to communicate to a truck in front or behind.

Say you’re towing a caravan at 90kmh. You can just say to the truck behind “white land cruiser and van to linfox truck, I’m slow, in 3km there’s a overtaking area I’ll let you go around.”

I’ve seen it a few times when travelling. I think that the best way for a slow vehicle to indicate that it is safe to overtake is to indicate left (near-side, passenger-side, kerb/shoulder-side, whatever) and merge onto the shoulder. This is what the majority of tractors do in my local region.

This provides those following better visibility of the road ahead and allows them to make up their own mind.

Also, those following, just be patient. The only reason why the tractor would be deliberately driving slow to annoy you is because you a being a dickhead. Don’t be a dickhead on the road.

I’m in rural sa and many trucks will indicate to let the person behind know it’s clear, especially over a crest.

I’ve seen it a lot, mostly by road trains on the Nullarbor, and we would wait for them to stop indicating. It’s just a brief signal, one or two flashes and then you’re safe to check if it’s safe.

I have also driven extensively through mainly country WA and elsewhere and briefly worked as a truck driver in the NT, in my experience there is no consistency in understanding of these signals, as pointed out by the article, and I’m sceptical that it is consistently applied by truckies.

I do believe that there is an understanding among experienced truckies and some(a majority???) of other road users that there is a system but it is not universally understood by cara-fucking-van drivers, or apparently school bus drivers either.

As a car driver I have on at least 2 occasions had a truckie indicate it is safe for me to overtake(indicating L-L) in a situation that would have caused an accident. The only time it is safe to overtake is when you as the driver can be satisfied it is safe to do so. Relying on potentially ambiguous signals that are not universally understood is a literal accident waiting to happen.

I have been slightly obsessed with this since being quite outraged at a clear signal to pass being so dangerous and I’ve raised it with several truckies over the years, I think a small majority of truckies assume it’s universally understood but a large minority never indicate to pass as it is dangerous/raises liability concerns. A clearly non random sample and I may have been asking leading questions…

You make a good point that for the truckies safety there is a need to indicate that it is unsafe but if people are misunderstanding this then I don’t know what the solution is.

– several edits for clarity –

I have done only one drive (or two…there and back) on roads that both had truckies and were single lane. Brissy to St George. West of Dalby I saw truckies indicating right to communicate that it’s safe to pass constantly. I had heard about it before and explained it to my co-driver because he was unfamiliar, but this was the first time I experienced it. And my experience was very strongly that yes, it is indeed a real thing.

I have never heard about the left blinker being used in the same way as you describe.