Yesterday I saw a car that had a message on its bumper. Not a bumper sticker, really, but a message spelled out in those vinyl letters: “I’VE BEEN REAR-ENDED FOUR TIMES – BACK OFF!!!”
This is on the 405 (near where the Goodyear blimp lands) during the evening rush. Traffic is often slow, and even when it’s moving reasonably well a one and a half second gap between cars is considered normal. A one second gap doesn’t cause much concern. The driver-training-recommended two second gap is a luxury. This guy was leaving a three second gap. Okay, I was rear-ended myself last March. (It was an inattentive driver, and not someone following too close – I was stopped in traffic.) I’ve found that I am more aware of the space in front of me since the woman who hit me pushed me into the car ahead of me. I can understand that the guy might want more space.
As I passed him I noticed his emergency flashers go on. I looked in the mirror and could see a car behind him that was farther away from him than I was from the car ahead of me. That’s just being paranoid. In California, people tend to drive closer to others than in other states I’ve driven in. It’s just the way we do it here. (At least in the L.A. area.)
Then I got to wondering about my first thought I had when I saw the guy’s message: How likely is it for someone to be rear-ended four times? I have no way of knowing, but I’m guessing the collisions were not spread out over 40 years; rather, I suspect that it would take a much more frequent occurance to merit going to a signmaker to have the message cut (you could tell they were applied all at once instead of one at a time) and put it on your car. I’m wondering if the cause of the collisions was the paranoid driver? Coldie’s Motorcycle Crash was apparently the result of someone stopping for no apparent reason at just the moment Coldie looked away. Could it be that Mr Paranoid Guy had a habit of stopping suddenly, or at times that everyone else would consider inappropriate, and causing people to run into him?
Of course, the driver behind should maintain a great enough distance that the driver ahead could lower an arresting hook and snag the three-wire infront of him. But it doesn’t work that way in the real world. There are collisions every day on the local freeways, and I’ll bet most if not all of them (leaving out the boneheads who try to put a 15-foot car into a 14 foot space) can be avoided by a person not following so closely and/or paying attention to the task at hand instead of talking on the phone or listening to the radio or talking to a passenger.
Could it be that Mr. Paranoid Guy was being so careful not to get into a collision that he caused himself to be rear-ended four times?
This is not a debate about driving safety. Just something that struck me when I saw this car.