No, not the fun kind of tailgaters who party before football games in the parking lot. I’m talking about the a-holes who follow you so close you can’t see their headlights in your rear view. Yeah, I know this has been done before, but it’s fresh on my mind…
This morning, I had another one of those idiots follow me on a one-lane (in each direction) road, then another, for about 16 miles total. A double yellow line in the center. I had no way to speed up (not that I do for tailgaters) since there were cars in front of me, but we were going 5 - 10 miles over the speed limit the whole way. He finally passed me when we got on the turnpike, glowering at me (as I yelled bad words at him).
My question to those of you who tailgate in such a situation (you know who you are): Why don’t you just pass? Yes, it’s against the law to cross a double yellow line to pass. But it’s also against the law to tailgate. So why not just pass, and it’s a win all around? You get ahead of a slower car, and I’m not getting tailgated, plus there’s at least the slim chance I’ll pass you later as you’re wrapped around a tree or getting ticket so I can flip you the bird and laugh at you.
Any speculation from those who don’t tailgate? Feel free to add your own traffic peeves.
This is a pet peeve of mine also.
What are they thinking ?
If the tailgater is going to set the following distance, feel free to set the corresponding safe speed.
If it were me, I would say I didn’t pass because it is more dangerous to pass double yellow than tailgate. Also, I’d hate to get in an accident and then have a SD thread written about the idiot that crashed passing on a double yellow.
But since I would suspect people like the OP experienced are not introspective, and the reason they don’t pass is because they are trying to communicate their opinion that you are an idiot. There aren’t a lot of ways to communicate between two cars, and most hand gestures can’t be seen well from a mirror. So they tailgate, not realizing that they are ALSO communicating that they, too, are idiots.
Age and experience has taught me that you can’t do anything about the idiots. For the OP and people in his situation, I recommend just driving a safe speed for the conditions-don’t slow down to taunt or “communicate” back to the jerk, and if there is a place to pull off to let them pass, do so. Yes, they “win”, but that’s OK. “Carma” doesn’t always get them, but so what? The world is full of idiots. If you tried to fix them all you wouldn’t have time for anything else.
His “communication” was that you should pass the cars in front. As the last car in line, one can’t safely pass five cars, but if each person passes in turn, all could eventually get around the slow car.
Was the road really 16 miles of double yellow? Or were there small passing sections? If there weren’t, then the true “idiot” was the guy in front of the line. He should let the others pass. If you find yourself holding up a long line, you are in the wrong, even if you are driving totally within the speed limit. See my comment about fixing the idiots-they may be wrong speeding, but you are also wrong for holding them up. Let them go be idiots ahead of you. It’s safer.
I think there are two kinds of tailgaters. The first kind is simply oblivious to what they are doing. They are crappy drivers who don’t notice there are people in those other cars. Teenage girl on a cell phone, harried mother late to school pick-up, daydreamers …
The second kind are males with testosterone poisoning, the people who cause most of the violent damage in every area of life. There are lots of them. I always pull over whenever at all possible for these blights upon the planet to get out of my life.
You can’t control what they do, but you can control what you do. Slowing down, for safety, to allow more time and space to react if, for example, a deer enters the road in front of you. If you’re driving slower, then you have more time and space to react to a hazaed in front of you, which in turn gives the tailgater more time to react to you and to that hazard.
So, it’s for safety. The closer they tailgate, the slower I go. For safety.
And I don’t get angry. Annoyed? Sometimes. And if they’re yelling at me as they pass, I don’t know because I don’t even look.
ETA: my post applies to one lane roads with no place to pull over. If multiple lanes, then I’m in the far right lane. If they’re still tailgating and not going around me, I slow down.
If one lane and then there appears a passing lane, I move to the right.
And to me it doesn’t matter why they do it. I don’t care why, I only care that they are doing it.
Yes. It’s kind of a country setting, and it was uninterrupted double lines.
And I don’t blame the guy in front at all. He was going 60 - 65 in a 55 MPH zone, and I was giving him 3 or 4 car lengths. He was directly in front of me. All tailgater guy had to pass was 2 cars, so I don’t buy this guy was somehow directing me to pass.
I don’t know what PA state says law with regard to the obligation of someone in the lead car of a line of traffic, I’ll have to check. But ISTM there was only one idiot / asshole in this scenario. And I’ve encountered this many times in my almost 40 years of driving. My theory is that their tailgating, in these dopes’ minds, isn’t really breaking the law. It’s understandable and reasonable to them, plus it is something of a subjective determination, unlike crossing a double yellow. “I wasn’t driving too close, I’m in complete control,” would be their idiotic description, I speculate.
I was just checking. I used to drive in a lot of similar roads. Long stretches of double yellow, with small passing zones. The usual case was the second car in line would either not pass, or pass really sloooowly, so only one car got around the rolling road block before it became double yellow again.
In your case, I would think the tailgating guy was trying to ‘force’ the line to go faster.
You are coming across as a passive aggressive jerk. Maybe you don’t mean to. Depends what you mean by slower.
If you go 25 in a 65, “for safety”, then you are as much of a jerk as the tailgater. If you mean you increase spacing with the car in front, but maintain the flow of traffic, then you are OK.
And Frank Bullitt tailgated, too. Look how THAT turned out. Two men dead, bodies burned beyond recognition. Waste of a perfectly good Charger.
What it means is you increase your following distance from the car in front. That way, if traffic ahead needs to slow/stop suddenly, you don’t need to brake as hard and risk a rear-ender from behind.
Gah, I have a sad story about this… I’ve never tailgated (not one of my particular vices), but have always been curious about why others do it. So, while still in my mid 20s, I came across a fellow who admitted to doing it all the time. When asked to explain, he gave pretty much the response that Just Asking did about trying to teach others a lesson and how his time was so much more important than those stragglers. We all looked at him like he had three heads, attempted to tell him how dangerous it really was and went on about our duties where we worked. We basically blew him off as simply too young and inexperienced to know better.
Anyway, I lost track of him soon after as I changed jobs, but I ran into another co-worker (who’d been privy) years after this exchange. According to them (and I do realize it could’ve very well been a FOAF UL), he pulled that stunt one too many times, and sadly, died as a result. Since this was pre-internet days, I obviously had no way to know if it was actually true or not, but I do know his attitude about it in general was appalling. In conclusion, if I had a point, they’re out there, risking everyone’s life to make a statement about how you ought to drive to satisfy their requirements, safe or no. Ugh.
I was going to write a similar post a couple of weeks ago. I drove for 13 miles on a rural two-lane road with the driver behind me consistently about 20 feet from my rear bumper. We were the only two cars and she had many opportunities to pass me…I slowed down and rode the right shoulder a few times (not being passive-aggressive but letting her know passing me would be just fine and I would accommodate.) Most of the time I was going at least five miles over the speed limit. Despite the road being mostly dead-straight through farm fields, and mostly empty, she never took me up on the suggestion. I was in a full-size cargo van with a big metal bumper and she in a small sedan so I would have been fine had she rear-ended me, her and her car, not so much.
When we finally got to town and two lanes, she finally passed me. Texting, I shit you not. So perhaps she’d been texting the whole way, and using me as her “guide”?
Other than that, I don’t know. I think it’s possible that some people simply never got proper driving instruction when they learned to drive, never learned the two-second rule, and honestly believe that travelling 60-70 mph 20-40 feet behind another vehicle is in fact safe.
I think some people drive too closely without realizing it. Just like I think some people drive too slowly without realizing it.
I’m not proud of being in the latter. But I don’t do a lot of driving on two-lane highways either. If I do notice a line of cars behind me, I’ll pick up the pace.
When I was learning to drive, my mom told me her theory on tailgaters. They need glasses. Of course, this doesn’t apply to the aggressive ones like in the OP, but those seemingly passive ones who are just always too damn close but don’t seem to want/need to pass. In the 30 years since Mom put this theory in my head, I’ve concluded she’s right in a lot of these cases. I’ve met an uncomfortable number of people who own glasses, but generally don’t wear them and say, “I just need them for driving.” But - they don’t put them on when behind the wheel, either. These are the same people who squint at street name signs. They really don’t realize they’re too close to the cars in front of them, because they’re only just in focus at that distance. Really freaking scary!
I do pass you across the double yellow where it’s safe to do so. It’s just very rarely safe to do so. You could just try speeding up, y’know. If you’re doing the speed limit on a straightaway, you’re doing it wrong.
Did you read the OP? Or were you responding to someone else?
FWIW, there were plenty of places where it would have been easy to pass. There really wasn’t a lot of traffic in either direction. That’s what prompted me to post the OP–why in the hell would someone tailgate when they could pass? If it’s because crossing the double line to pass is illegal, so is tailgating. That’s specifically what I’m wondering about. (And I am hopeful someone in the “I tailgate whenever I want” tribe actually drops in and explains.)
So speed limits are actually what you personally think is the speed limit and everyone else has to adjust to your opinon, or else you tailgate? Good luck, pal.
Well in actually increasing the distance isn’t changing your instantaneous speed for most of the trip… only for that time you are adjusting that distance.
The tailgater thinks that leaving a large gap is going slow…
You have to ignore the tailgater, just forget they are there.
