Certainly true in Portland, OR. I pay no attention to tailgaters. I drive at what I consider a safe and sane speed and refuse to let someone else’s problem become my emergency. People tend to speed through our neighborhood, as it’s an area where people from other areas transition on their way to work and home. I always go the speed limit or slower when driving through here, as there are a lot of pedestrians. I get tailgated all the time and get a certain amount of pleasure out of their frustration, I have to admit, but hitting someone in a crosswalk is just not gonna happen.
This. You can’t make the other driver quit tailgating. You can’t make the other driver pass. The only actions you can control are your own. Every other option (speeding up, slowing down) carries a big downside. Pull over, let the jerk go by.
[sub][dream sequence]Then hit him with your front mounted Sidewinder missles[/dream sequence][/sub]
If I’m not going to pass the car ahead of me, I leave enough room for anyone behind me to pass, which is also following the two-second rule.
Admittedly, there are times when it’s impossible to follow that rule (on multi-lane freeways) because I’d get a steady stream of traffic barging in to fill the gap. Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess.
When someone tailgates me to an extreme and there’s not a lot of traffic, I often slow down. I keep slowing down until they back off or pass me. Either way, problem solved. However, I do worry that it might trigger road rage. Fortunately it’s not terribly common for anyone to tailgate so close as to trigger this response.
You have every right, but what good does it do?
I try to let road anger be other people’s problem. It’s their heart attack, not mine. I confess I’m not always successful at sidestepping the anger myself, but it really does help to try. Not suppressing the rage, but deflecting or redirecting it in a way that lets it pass. More like the Bene Gesserit fear thing. 
You aren’t a jerk for slowing down…you value your life. When someone tailgates you they are putting your life at serious risk for no benefit. There is no benefit to tailgating. At all. By slowing down you are taking control of the situation by forcing the tailgater to have better reaction time. At 65mph, with 10 feet of space behind you, you have a great chance of being rear-ended in many situations. At least if you slow down to 25mph the chance is greatly reduced, and the energy behind any possible collision is reduced.
The person slowing down isn’t the jerk. It is the person tailgating and putting other people’s lives at risk for literally no benefit. How can you say otherwise? Reasonably?
If you want to go out racing go to a race track. Otherwise use the road for its intended purpose; transportation.
Yep. That’d be safe for everyone!
A million times this. In Texas where I live, it’s not uncommon at all to pull off on the shoulder, so I also do it any time an asshole pulls this maneuver. It’s more important to me to be, I don’t know, alive than right.
Small comfort when you are on a bike and being tailgated.
This. Very much so.
To let them aggravate you, well, life’s too short. Keep it sweet.
Maybe we’re imagining different situations?
If you are driving 65 on a two-lane double yellow stretch of road, with no passing zones, and someone is tailgating you, if you slow down to 25 in the interests of ‘safety’ you are a jerk. What is preventing you from pulling over and letting them pass, in the interests of actual safety? Pulling part way over an waving them by in a straight section that you in front can see is clear(double yellow or not)?
You don’t have to win! Just let them go. Who cares if they are in the wrong, if they are jerks? Slowing down to 25 in a 65 is trying to teach THEM a lesson, nothing more. You’d be sending the same ‘message’ that the tailgater is trying to send to you. Do you think the message is getting through?
If the tailgater didn’t pass when you slowed to 55, 45, whatever, he’s not going to pass at 25. Are you going to eventually stop in the middle of the road? (Yea, that’s safe.) Now it becomes a duel between two victims of “testosterone poisoning”. Whose is going to give first? Who is going to “win”? And when some innocent law abiding citizen comes up on this little macho tussle while going 65, what do you think is going to happen?
I hope you’re not advocating slowing to 25 in a 65? Because that is not safe, either, and you’d be compounding 1 unsafe situation, the initial tailgater, into 2 or more.
Might want to reconsider this stance, because the longer the tailgater is tailgating you, the more you are at risk, for reasons described upthread.
Except if you end up seriously hurt, or worse.
What’s really fun is when the tailgater finally passes, then drives in front of you 3 mph slower than you’re going.
Ha! I’ve seen that far too many times!
I was on I-10 in the middle of the California desert running on cruise control, when I passed a car. As soon as I passed, they sped up and passed me, then slowed down to what they were doing before. I, still on cruise control, came up on them and passed again. Then they passed me again! WTF? I eventually speeded enough to get about a mile ahead of them, then went back to the speed limit and cruise control.
I always wondered what they were thinking? Did they think being in front was somehow safer? Were they ‘teaching me a lesson’? Did they think it was a personal affront to be passed? They weren’t glaring at me, or giving me the finger. It was like they didn’t even know what they were doing. Auto pilot.
When I was driving,I’d slow down and pull over… Their problem,not mine. I had kids to raise and a life to live.
I have turned in my DL,had a couple of episodes where I forgot what to do next… Blinker/clutch/turn wheel/tap brake?? I was scared I’d turn the HEB into a drive through.
I drive a two lane mountain road to work every morning. I’ll pull over a couple of times a week.
There is one section that is the limit is 30, which is ridiculous. You can easily go 50. (and get ticketed, like my Wife)
But I’ve seen speed traps set up there, so I go 30-35. When I get someone behind me, I’ll pull over for them.
^This. Overall, tailgating doesn’t bother me because it’s a drop in the ocean of bad driving habits you see on US roads. The sole instance where it troubles me is when the tailgater refuses to pass me. I’ve been on six and eight lane highways where all other lanes are empty, yet someone pulls up behind me in the only occupied lane (not the passing lane) and sits on my bumper. For miles.
I typically ignore them. If they get aggressive, I reduce speed. When they finally pass it’s invariably with this smug look of triumph at getting past me, something they could have done whenever they wanted.
I admit being guilty of tailgating, on very specific occasions. Bear with the metric system here. I often drive a 200 km trip on a narrow, winding, hilly road with mostly a 80 km / h speed limit and heavy traffic. The law here says that speeding by 10 % or more over the limit gets you a ticket. Consequently, I keep my speed at just under 88 km /h anytime I safely can. This is the way 90 % of drivers drive here, so this also happens to be the smoothest, safest speed with which to travel. If everyone kept this speed, traveling the 200 km stretch would be a breeze.
However, there’s often a person or two who just decide to go against the flow and maintain a lower speed for apparently no good reason. The weather is fine, the road is dry, they drive a capable car, they aren’t scouting for an unfamiliar turn etc. They just want to drive appreciably slower than everybody else for the remaining 100 or 150 km. I’m not talking about driving a couple of km’s slower, but something like 60 or 70 km / h on the 80 km / h road that almost everyone travels at 85 - 90 km / h.
Opportunities to pass are few and far between, and, stuck behind the under-speeding idiot, a line quickly forms behind me, with the more aggressive drivers taking any risky chance to pass, endangering everyone. And all this would be avoided, if only the slow people picked up the speed to the prevailing level.
I’ve catched myself driving too slow on occasion, and the clearest indicator of that is a tailgater on my rear-view mirror. I hate being tailgated as much as everyone, and quickly speed up to the proper speed on the road but no more, and I’m instantly fine. When I’m stuck with a slow one, I may end up tailgating him for a while, and sometimes he gets it and picks up the speed, and everyone is happy.
The problem with roads like this is that while natives can take them at the speed limit or above, non-natives are going to go more slowly since they don’t know what to expect. I don’t get mad at people going slowly in front of me since I’ve been a slowpoke in other places - but I always pull over when I can. And it is absolutely extra stupid to tailgate the second or later car in a line, since they can’t do anything about the first car.
I always love the “its not my fault other drivers actually go the speed limit!!” defense of bad driver behavior.
Remember the wisdom of George Carlin: “Have you ever noticed everyone driving in front of you is an idiot and everyone driving behind you is a maniac?”