Insurance companies do not have final say on the issue of fault if a driver decides to litigate. Juries are instructed on comparative fault in most states and issue damage awards according to the percentage of fault they assign to the parties to the action.
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That’s how cops force people into speeding for tickets at night. They zoom up on your rear end over and over, and if you’re not attentive and do speed up to try and widen the gap a little, on come the blue lights and you’re fucked. Also they’ll pull you over when you just try to change lanes and get out of their way.
This isn’t bullshit. It’s happened to me. The cop kept running up on me like he was going to ram, and when I realized I was going 85 in a 60, I tried to move over and slow down, and that’s when they decided to pull me over.
That wasn’t pacing. It was an active attempt to spook me into speeding.
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“A person commits the offense of unlawful stop or deceleration if the person is operating a vehicle and the person stops or suddenly decreases the speed of the vehicle without first giving an appropriate signal to the driver immediately to the rear when there is opportunity to give the signal.”
http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/811.500
Flashing brake lights without really braking suddenly is fine (and the appropriate signal for conveying that you will be slowing down in Oregon). Actually braking suddenly is something else (and what the lead driver in this video did). The fact that the lead driver then pulled over to the right lane after brake checking is what clinches their 50% guilt for me. They could have just moved over and let the rude tailgater pass instead of contributing to an accident.
Following too close is also a violation for the rear vehicle, but Oregon LEOs will cite for brake checking also. [I used to work at an Oregon law enforcement agency.]
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I confirm that my analysis is based on an assumption that the slow driver braked on purpose, the premise of the original post.
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To be fair, we don’t actually know that. Could have been a squirrel that jumped in front of the lead car.
Okay, probably not. But it’s at least a plausible reason to tap the brakes.
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“ascribing motives to the brake-checker”
Maybe. If anything, I’m interpreting the “conversation” those two drivers are having.
The tailgater is saying, “Look at me! I think you’re going slow and I want to pass you.”
The brake-checker is saying, “Yeah, I see you, but I don’t care what you think. You shall not pass!”
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I reject that this brake checker is in any way responsible for the dangerous situation created by that tailgater. It is not always possible, and was not in this case, to immediately ‘get the hell out of the way’. In the meantime, it is neither reasonable nor safe to tolerate some maniac driving within inches of your rear bumper at freeway speeds. It’s not ‘safe’ to brake check either but given that being safe is no longer an option due to reckless driving on the part of the tailgater, it is perfectly reasonable.
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I guess it depends on your definition of tap. You don’t have to apply the brakes to flash the brake lights (at least on the vehicles I’ve driven). I downloaded the video and ran it frame by frame. It’s about a second and a half of the lead driver applying the brakes and suddenly slowing the forward progress of their vehicle. That seems like more than a tap to me.
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In France, for once, we have relatively good laws regarding this. At least, as far as I know: I’m no lawyer.
In a pinch, you’re responsible for what happens in front of you, and NOT for anything happening behind you.
You have to maintain a safe distance with the car in front of you, if the driver behind you does not and causes an accident (whatever happens: pileups included), he is responsible.
Now, of course, responsible or not, you might need to go to court, have your car fixed, etc… All thing not that funny.
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You misunderstand. For tailgaters you increase the following distance between you and the car in front of you.
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I don’t see evidence in the video of your claim. There is no apparent reduction in velocity on the part of the lead vehicle.
It also appears that the lead drive pulled into the right lane at the earliest safe opportunity. What video did you watch?
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Unsafe driving and actually causing an accident are two different things though. Just because someone invites you to punch them doesn’t mean you didn’t commit assault for punching them. A tailgater can tailgate without an accident happening (this occurs frequently and every driver on a freeway has probably seen it). Not every tailgating occurrence ends in an accident and they’re more likely to end in an accident if the leader driver brake checks. If a tailgater is almost causing an accident, you don’t have to help them achieve it.
I watched this video frame by frame. The lead vehicle does appear to lurch a little in the 1.5 seconds that their brakes were applied. The second driver had been maintaining speed in order to tailgate and not hit the lead vehicle. That changed when the lead vehicle appeared to intentionally slow down. They got over immediately thereafter, in my guess, because they realized they caused an accident.
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What accident was ‘caused’ by the brake checker? All I saw was a one vehicle accident caused by a tailgater losing control of their vehicle. Was there a second accident later or out of frame which was caused by the lead vehicle?
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The tailgater didn’t cause the accident, but only created the circumstance whereby the brake checker could cause it. Plenty of people tailgate without getting into accidents. It’s still wrong, but there’s a significant difference between driving dangerously and actually causing an accident. From a purely observational standpoint with what is seen in the video, the accident occurred directly following and because of the change in behavior of the lead driver. No amount of the tailgater being a dick makes the result 100% their fault from a causal standpoint. Some insurance companies and police in certain jurisdictions might agree also.
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Well, you got me to watch the video again. One of us is just seeing what they want to see. Unsurprisingly, my conclusion is that it’s you. The lead car slowed down not at all to my eye.
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It’s also courteous to stay out of the right lane - and especially to not merge back into the right lane - just before a populated on-ramp, to give incoming vehicles an opportunity to merge safely. This is what the minivan appeared to be doing before the tailgater raced up on them.
The tailgater only closed to an unsafe distance after it was physically impossible for the minivan to merge right, and they had not safely cleared the merging SUV at the time the minivan performed the brake-check. Given the propensity for tailgaters to try and roar around on the right at the earliest possible opportunity, the brake check could easily have been an attempt to create some space in the knot of cars so that the minivan could merge safely without worrying about the tailgater doing something else unsafe.
Further, I too didn’t observe an appreciable drop in the speed of the minivan, so they couldn’t have been applying the brakes very hard. At that distance, even taking your foot off the gas to tap the brake pedal enough to light up your tail lights would result in the tailgater closing the gap faster than would be safe. The fact that the minivan then merged rightward after the tailgater’s freakout doesn’t increase their guilt at all; they were in the process of getting in front of the merging SUV at the time the tailgater over-reacted. The merging SUV reacted by slowing down and moving onto the shoulder (a good move since the dashcam vehicle didn’t seem to be in a hurry to stop), allowing the minivan driver to proceed with what they were going to do anyway.
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The proper question is not one of responsibility, but what is the best course of action? Brake-checking does not “fix” tailgating. It amplifies a dangerous situation. The tailgater created the dangerous situation, no doubt, but brake-checking makes it worse. The video is proof: had the lead car not brake-checked, the tailgater would not have lost control. The only good thing that came out of this incident is that the tailgater did not hit another vehicle, or cross into the oncoming lane.
Predictability is key to safe driving. Slamming on the brakes when someone is two feet behind you at speed is recipe for a collision.
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Plenty of people tailgating do get into accidents, also. not sure what your argument is, that tailgating is perfectly safe unless/until someone flashes brake lights? showing brake lights is a perfectly normal thing to encounter on a freeway, and if you have created a situation where you are unable to respond to such a thing, and your failure to respond safely to said event specifically because of what you are doing at the time then the accident was 100% caused by you, regardless of the circumstances under which the perfectly normal situation of the vehicle in front of you applying their brakes might happen to occur.
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If you will check the vIdeo there is an unsafe distance for the person in the car in the right lane to pull in front of the other driver. The 'brake checker is following safety rules before pulling into the other lane. The Person in the passing lane is there because of giving right of way to a vehicle that entered the freeway. The passing person is likely speeding (judging from the road traffic) and tail gating. The person may have breaked for any number of reasons we do not see on the video. The tale gater is clearly in the wrong both legally and ethically.
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I have to admit I did get a teensy bit of schadenfreude watching that. I used to have to commute over a very steep and very twisty and very narrow mountain pass - all switchback turns and sheer drop offs and no shoulder. For slightly over half the year, the road was covered in snow. And I used to get these total assholes who’d do EXACTLY what the tailgater here did - which considering the ICE AND SNOW was even more insanely dangerous. Then they’d repeatedly slow down and speedup so that they were fake-ramming the back of my car. Seriously, we’re talking inches between bumpers if anything. We’re talking parallel-parking distances.
They were so aggressive that even when the rare turn out would come up, I was stuck. On the snow especially, you need to slow down ahead of time to take one of those turn outs (esp. because they tended to be very small) and with those assholes right up against my bumper, I couldn’t slow down at all.
And here’s the thing that really freaked me out: I was an extremely experienced snow driver at the time. I could get away with stuff that just the thought of kind of freaks me out now (like getting around switchback turns by throwing the car into a skid that’d carry me through it at 90 degrees, then popping back straight), and I’d be going as fast as I absolutely could without losing control of the car (call it about 40mph on that road under slicker conditions). I’d be going around turns and I could feel the back end of the car starting to float. AND THEY WOULD STILL BE RIGHT ON MY TAIL, and when I did eventually hit a stretch long and straight enough for them to pass me, they’d speed up to at least 60mph. It still scares/terrifies/enrages me. They had traction control and all wheel drive, which is the only reason they could get away with it, but shit, the car had to be compensating for so much, and it’d just take one little thing and…just, it was so, so, so dangerous.
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