Yeah, it is. Sure, this may be a one-in-a-million case of someone who freaked out when they saw the breaks being used, but it does add to escalation; something that should be avoided on the road. Break checking is not a part of safe and defensive driving. Besides the escalation angle, one can slip when break checking and accidentally break harder than they wanted too; and the most likely accident to happen then is the checker would get rear ended. Even if it’s not my fault I don’t want my car damaged, having to deal with police reports and paperwork, and putting myself in added danger.
I honestly fail to see how doing something that if done wrong on either person’s end causes a collision adds to the safety of the situation.
Go ahead and continue the practice if you want, but it is not a safe practice because it adds to escalation and if you slip up and brake too hard you can get rear ended.
OK, got it. You’re right, everybody else is wrong. All of the dozens of people who watched the video and saw, as I did, that he couldn’t safely pull over, are wrong.
And you know that there was no road condition that required him to brake. You can see what’s not on the video, the road he saw ahead of him. Maybe he saw a piece of debris in the road; maybe he saw the car in the right lane ahead move a little towards the left, and he wanted to slow and make sure he wasn’t about to pull out. Maybe he saw he was going at the speed limit and wanted to slow a couple mph.If you’re driving and you think you need to slow down a little, you are allowed to.
“They would have been at fault enough to bear the financial and legal burdens.” As opposed to what, the internet burden? So, you admit, legally the following driver was wrong. Thank you.
And of course you don’t care what the police say, you know better. You have more training, more experiencing enforcing traffic laws, more actual knowledge of those laws. Right.
From what you’ve said here, I suspect we all can guess which car you would be driving. Hopefully when you crash, you can talk your way out of it, with your superior knowledge and understanding, and your marvelously cool and rational manner.
I don’t brake check. I also don’t think that the driver that brake checked was at fault. I don’t even know that what they did was brake checking, since the video doesn’t prove that (we really don’t know why they braked from that video).
The tailgater was an incompetent driver, which was abundantly clear from the video long before they crashed. Merely using a turn signal, driving along normally without brake checking, or any number of other things could as easily been what eventually triggered them flying off the road or getting in some other accident, since they really weren’t in control of their vehicle long before the accident.
Good job completely and repeatedly ignoring all my points and everything I’ve been saying, strawmanning me, and completely ignoring about every other word.
There is more than legal responsibility on utilizing a shared resource such as a road, you have an ethical responsibility to keep the road safe through your actions. This includes not pulling stunts like break checking and increasing hazards.
Are you insinuating that I’m a tailgater/aggressive driver? Despite the fact that I’ve been talking about defensive driving in every post I’ve written here? Sure, assume that. I’ve not tailgated anyone in probably 25 years, and nor would I ever. I do what I can to keep everything safe. As I’ve stated in previous posts I don’t drive my max safe speed; I drive within a middle point of that, such that I can speed up or down to avoid hazards. I never get too close and if I’m pressed to, I back the fuck off quickly, but without breaking typically; as long as it’s safe to do so. Each situation, though, is different with different variables to take into account.
But I guess you, thinking break checking is such a safe thing must be the superior one.
Like, by not driving at high speeds inches from another car that has no place to go?
Using a car’s signalling devices to caution other drivers is not a “stunt”. Bearing down on a driver at high speed in an attempt to intimidate them into acting for your benefit, especially when that driver is obeying the law and not in any way improperly inconveniencing you, on the other hand…
As a driver, it is your responsibility to go a speed you feel safe going. Going any faster is irresponsible. It is also your responsibility to not change lanes unless you feel safe doing so.
Which all makes sense. Only you know your own driving skill and your car’s capabilities, and only you have a 360 degree view of what’s around your car. So, no, the guy in front doesn’t have an obligation to pull over or to speed up because there’s a guy up his tailpipe: it’s just the courteous thing to do, if and when the driver feels it is safe to do so. Up until the moment he did a brake check, he was driving safely.
Personally, I think that (absent some legitimate reason to brake), the brake check was the wrong thing to do. The guy behind him (through his own fault) had no time to react to any sort of deceleration, and even if the guy in front tapped the brakes lightly enough to bring up the light but not enough to add any additional friction to the wheels spinning, he still took his foot off the gas to do so, and caused the distance to close further just from the deceleration of letting off the gas. An equally effective “get off my ass” signal could have been sent more safely with the hazard signals.
On the whole, I’d give 95% of the blame for the accident to the tailgater, for the percentage of the “safe distance” he closed before the brake check, and for his inability to retain control over his vehicle afterwards. But I do think that the brake checker deserves a small 5% of the blame for causing the gap to close even further.
My personal thought of what he should have in this situation would be to maintain speed (generally with cruise control) and merge right when it’s safe.
Your point is, no matter what some asshole does driving, it’s up to the safe driver to break the law, take unsafe actions, and not brake when he feels he needs to, in order to avoid an accident.
You have spent every long post of yours supporting and defending the person who entirely caused this by his illegal, reckless actions. Now, why would I think you were an asshole driver, just because you spend so much effort defending one? I wonder.
That’s not what you said initially. You said that there was plenty of room for them to merge right at the point they decided to brake-check, and that’s a plainly incorrect statement (snapshot taken right at the :30 mark, just as they tapped the brakes):
Merging ahead of the on-ramp would have been unsafe because of the incoming SUV. Merging past the on-ramp once it was safe to do so was clearly what the driver intended to do anyway, based on their actions after the tailgater went off the road. At the point that they brake-checked, it may have been physically possible to change lanes, but in no way would I call that a safe enough lead to merge with.
In my experience, driving out past a car in the right lane until it’s safe to merge again is a potentially dangerous situation when dealing with a tailgater like this, because they will roar around you as soon as their rear bumper is clear of the driver in the right lane, cutting off the person they’re passing and unpredictably blocking your attempt to legally merge. I can very easily take the minivan’s brake-check as an effort to forestall that by getting the tailgater to back off long enough to perform a merge at a safe leading distance.
Given how tightly they were adhering to the speed limit, it’s actually possible that the minivan driver was using cruise control, and tapped the brakes just enough to disable it so that they could more actively control the vehicle in a stressful situation (I know, there’s a switch to turn it off too that doesn’t require using the brake pedal, but I’ve always found the brake-tap method more convenient and less distracting). The end result would be visually indistinguishable from a brake check.
I’ve said many times, over and over that the vast majority of blame here goes to the tailgater. I’m focusing on the checker’s actions in my replies because so many people are defending that person’s actions as if they are a totally safe thing to do.
It is a stunt if you’re using them other than what they are intended, like trying to dissuade tailgaters by scaring them. To me that really qualifies the use of the word stunt. Yes, I know I’m assuming that in this case; but having been someone who used to break check tailgaters in the past, the people who intentionally do that are doing it as a stunt.
I disagree with this. You should be going a speed that is safe for conditions, including your own, but not the maximum. You should not be going as fast as you feel safe doing. For example, if I feel that I’m able to go 100MPH would not be a responsible thing to do, despite if I am completely safe and trained to do so. And, as I said, I always try to give myself some room to speed up as well as down to get out of unsafe situations. Sometimes it’s better to go a bit faster to get out of an unsafe situation a bit faster. It all depends on conditions and circumstances.
I agree with that, yes.
I agree with you here again.
I’d have increased speed just a bit to get out of the situation by a few MPH to get that bit of extra distance from the black car a bit quicker (from the video it looked like driving conditions . Barring that I would have just kept going my speed and gotten over when it was safe; so we’re in most agreement here.
Fair enough, that was before I watched it a lot more (and I was getting a bit hot about it with the other commenter) and I wasn’t about to go back end edit the previous post. There is only barely enough room there, but there would have been some more room soon. The silver minivan was pulling away fast, although I admit it is hard to judge what the SUV would have done. Again, I’d have waited it out or given it a bit more gas to get that extra bit of room to go and get between them. Again, my preference with this situation is to get myself the fuck out of there.
I apologize for saying that you do.
As above, I think they take a bit of responsibility here but aren’t “at fault” if we’re going to put it in black and white terms. Legally they weren’t at fault, but they do share a bit of the ethical culpability (I’d agree to the 5%) of the accident.
They were definitely incompetent, and yes, even signaling may have made them do the drastic overcorrection they did, but signaling isn’t something that’s an intended aggressive maneuver as break checking is.
I think you misread what I was trying to say. I meant that “You should feel safe at the speed you’re going,” not, “You should increase your speed until you almost don’t feel safe.”
If the fastest speed you feel safe going is, say, 110 km/h, it’s perfectly fine to be going 100 km/h, but you shouldn’t let someone push you into going 120 km/h. Driving at a speed which feels unsafe to you is irresponsible, because you’re going to get twitchy, and probably overreact if you have to react to something.
Fair enough; it kind of read as if you meant as fast as you feel safe.
I agree; I wouldn’t just go faster than I feel safe going ever for someone behind me. I mostly wouldn’t even speed up for a tailgater unless I thought it would actually help; I would, though, speed up if it would help me get out of the way quicker, to get myself out of the situation. Speeding up for a tailgater for their sake won’t usually help because you give them that inch and they still want a mile.
In Australia the car behind is at fault. It’s a good rule. Tailgating like this is dangerous. The tailgater showed poor skills not to anticipate a push back from such rude behaviour and they clearly were driving beyond their level of competence, which nearly caused a three car accident. Lucky the other cars behind were safely driven.
