What I don’t understand about tailgaters is when they’ll sit right on my tail, making it very clear that I’m not going the sputtered they want, even when it’s a highway and there’s an empty lane to the left that they could happily overtake in. If I pull across, they just speed up and bully the next person out of the way. (NB - I do try to stay in the inside lane, oblivious middle lane drivers do my head in)
Generally I drive at or around the speed limit but that doesn’t seem to be enough for some people.
The worst thing I do(and I really should grow up and stop), is when someone cuts me up or pulls into the braking gap I’ve left myself, I won’t generally slow down to restore it. I figure the person who cut me up is fine with me being that close.
The way people cut you up all the time and never, ever thank you for letting them in just encourages me to drive closer in heavy traffic and not let people in.
I’m that same jerk. At the calm of my desk I know it’s something I should stop doing. I know I should back off and give them some room but on the road, I have a hard time with it.
Talking about highway driving, it’s not unusual for someone to be tailgating me even though I generally drive 10-20 km above the speed limit. I don’t believe most are agressive assholes. They just don’t think about having to brake suddenly, or they can’t help themselves from closing the gap. I think what annoys me most about tailgating is that for all the extra risk, at 100 km/hr, not keeping back an extra 10 metres is going to get them there 0.36 seconds sooner than they would have (not including collisions).
Well, I wouldn’t say it accomplishes nothing. Nothing much, but maybe still a little.
Even if the lead car never speeds up/pulls over, if you’ve got a line of ten cars tailgating behind it (versus ten cars following with multi-car-length gaps between each), you’ve managed to increase traffic density without decreasing speeds, which means higher road throughput. That seems like a good thing, at least.
There are people who speciaiize in studying things like traffic movement, and it’s actually true that people driving overly cautiously (through design or poor driving skills) and/or do other things to block the flow of traffic (like drive slower than traffic in the far left lane) cause more accidents and more bottlenecks than speeders, as long as the speeders are otherwise careful drivers.
I don’t agree with @thirdworldtaxi with regard to “get right up on their ass and turn my brights on” because that is not being an otherwise careful driver, but people who are not paying full attention to driving are a major cause of danger on the road.
This. The drivers I’m most afraid of are those who drive 35 in a 45, and then when the speed limit drops to 25, keep on going 35 - it’s like they’re completely unaware of their surroundings. That’s my message to back waaay off.
I remember once on a drive down through Oxfordshire/Berkshire, the guy I was following drove at a steady 45 - in the open stretches where the limit was 60 and in the villages where it was 30.
I don’t get the people who drive overly slowly, but also fail to do other things like indicate. They’re not being cautious, just totally unaware.
To return to tailgating, I read once that part of the reason it irritates so much is that your perception of your personal space extends further behind you than it does in front.
Really? I guess potentially being rear ended by someone who seems to really want to touch my bumper is just none of my fucking business, eh pal? Mirrors are for noobz, amirite?!?
Revenge is the safest solution: I use traffic to my advantage to end up ahead of them anyway a short while down the road.
The reason people do stupid stuff like that is usually because they didn’t see you before switching lanes, or to a lesser extent because they saw you and didn’t think to wait until you passed before getting in the lane behind you; much lower probability is that they did it on purpose specifically to bug you. Never ascribe to malice…
I assume everyone else on the road has at least 3 strikes against them from the following list: alcohol, other drugs, exhaustion, stress, distraction due to phone, poor driving skills, poor mental skills in general. They’re not out to get me, they just aren’t safe drivers and I have to watch out for their stupidity at all times.
Shit, I’ve been rear ended 3 times at red lights. Two times, the red was stale. Another time I got rear ended on the freeway, I’m not sure the car behind me was tailgaiting, but I learned an important lesson about electronically assisted brakes - make sure no one is tailgaiting you because your car stops faster.
Not tailgaiting isn’t fucking hard, folks, give it a try some time.
Ooookay. So, I make around minimum wage, so that should clear up the trope of some greedy cab driver driving like Steven Seagall in figure eights through traffic flipping the bird and honking. I have to go the speed limit because passengers (falsely) accuse me of trying to “cheat them” if I don’t. I never said I speed, so I’m not sure what caused the histrionics there.
I am an attentive driver, and have not been involved in a single accident, or fender bender, in my entire life.
And I rarely tailgate (should have made that clear in the original post), and only when the driver in front of me is obviously not paying attention. And I do it not to punish them, but to remind them "Hey, pay attention, there are other people on the road besides your phone. Even though it might be hard to imagine, as someone who spends 50+ hours driving all over the place, city, highway, freeway, rural, etc, I have a thing or two to say about driving, and am pretty knowledgable about sharing the road and what works and doesn’t.
But since it’s obviously ‘Shit all over cab drivers because Uber, bro’ month, I’m not even going to finish responding to the rest of your points, because I already know how it’s going to turn out. You ignoring me, and dredging up cartoonish stereotypes, and ignorantly pontificating on the transportation trade. And because I am so exhausted this already, I’m done with this thread. So please don’t waste any more time projecting on me.
It’s not either/or. Tailgating is a pejorative term. Let’s set it aside for a moment. Do you fail to see how alerting a driver who is causing a bottleneck know that he should speed up? I don’t tailgate often, and I always honk first. If there was a way to speak to the driver, and ask politely if he could speed up a little< I would certainly prefer that. I certainly don’t enjoy having to tailgate.
