Tailgate a compact car in your SUV and watch the fines double or triple.
Tailgate a motorcycle in your compact car and watch the penalties soar.
Tailgate a SUV with your semi truck or bus and prepare to pay big bucks.
It’s time for more active enforcement and harsher sanctions against those who deliberately endanger others on the roadways. Tailgating has reached epidemic proportions and represents an entirely needless risk of human life. The continuing trend towards increased vehicular size, weight and horsepower (read SUV) mandates a narrowing of the law concerning their operation. The huge inequity of risk for those hit by a SUV while driving a compact automobile makes this vital.
The previous scenario is not the only example of disproportionate risk. Regular cars tailgating motorcyclists or bicyclists also represent an equally egregious violation of the law. Similarly, trucks, buses and other high-load vehicles should face the same increased penalties for tailgating passenger cars. Fortunately, large commercial vehicles are usually operated by professionals whose entire livelihood depends upon a clean driving record. They are much less likely to commit such breaches of safety on the road.
The same cannot be said for a significant portion of SUV drivers. Given a vehicle that is specifically designed to operate like an ordinary car while possessing the gross weight and bumper height of a truck, many people continue to drive as if they are in a sedan. The intense negligence and lack of social cohesion demonstrated by such conduct merits equally intense penalties for those unwilling to make proper allowances for correct following distance.
In the last decade, operating a motor vehicle on an urban freeway has become nothing short of perilous. People inconsiderately follow other cars at high speed with only a meter separating their bumpers. Such callous disregard for safety is a significant threat to public well being and needs to treated as such. While tailgating has been a fairly common moving violation throughout the history of driving, the SUV specifically has changed all of that. It is now possible for an average driver to pilot a multi-ton transport without the usual limitations of performance, handling and acceleration so common to high gross weight vehicles.
Detroit has carefully bred these inadequacies out of the current SUV designs. There has been absolutely no commensurate effort on the part of industry to educate these same drivers about the increased risk that improper operation represents to the driving public. One of the only safety campaigns initiated by automakers related to this class of vehicle merely has dealt with the risk of rollover. This is strictly protection of their consumer market segment and has little to do with the increased threat to others on the road.
Tailgaters have another equally profound effect upon other drivers. Though not as heinous as the willful and unnecessary endangerment of human life, it is just as detrimental to existence. People who are unwilling to follow at the correct distance rarely allow another car to merge in front of them. This intrinsically compressed gap between vehicles utterly forbids a smooth merge for anyone else. While forcing their way past a merging vehicle, these road hogs often cause other drivers to abruptly brake or needlessly slow down. Such sudden speed changes, even by only a very few drivers, have been shown to cause many freeway commute traffic jams. The inability to fluidly merge into and out of traffic easily stands as one of the greatest single contributing factors to freeway traffic. Tailgaters are among the most uncooperative of all drivers and therefore one of the greatest causes of commute traffic.
It is impossible to overstate the profoundly deleterious effects of traffic gridlock upon commuters, society and the environment. The amount of quality time people lose, stalled in traffic instead of being at home contributes to premature disintegration of the family nucleus and relationships in general. The amount of workplace productivity lost and critical appointments missed caused by needless road congestion is incalculable. The direct costs of medical treatment for emotional stress pale in comparison to the pulmonary damage of pollution and collision injuries promoted by heavy traffic.
Even more insidious is how stop and go traffic forces internal combustion engines to operate in their least efficient mode. This causes megatons of extra pollution to be released worldwide on an almost daily basis. The additional mechanical wear and tear on vehicles alone (disregarding surplus emissions) represents millions, if not a billion dollars of needless depreciation in value each day. Gyrate this into the premature failure of a product so resource intensive as automotive transportation and the cost to our planet and its people assumes staggering proportions.
While it is convenient to point out how vividly this issue argues in favor of mass transportation, that is not salient to this debate. However vital comprehensive urban mass transit might be, it is a long way off, nonetheless. The issue at hand is that our current resources must be husbanded as best we can. Allowing a small portion of drivers to endanger lives, congest roadbeds not to mention degrade both the quality of life and environment as a whole is entirely impermissible.
Stark proof of this fact stands in the metering lights regulating so many commute onramps. During most of their operation they serve a single function; to facilitate merging into the flow of traffic. Only a small fraction of their time on duty is devoted to the more critical service of restricting traffic influx onto freeways during peak periods. For proof, observe how frequently a dual lane onramp’s metering lights cycle at maximum speed instead of with a truly noticeable delay. Only at peak hours do the most congested areas have significant wait times to enter the roadway. Otherwise, these metering lights are merely regulating the ease of merging into traffic.
The seemingly minor discourtesy of tailgating demonstrates, in fact, an enormous lack of social cohesion. It is the automotive equivalent of queue jumping and nothing less than a flagrant disregard for the rights and safety of others. Compound the price of this antisocial conduct with huge cost increase for medical treatment of accident victims involved in disproportionate vehicle size collisions. Ever-increasing gross vehicular weight further augments the incidence of death or severe injury arising from an accident and the equally magnified monetary expense of hospital ICU and critical care. Multiply all of this by increased resource consumption, intensified pollution, not to mention the exacerbation of road rage and an alarming picture emerges. Finally, examine the lost police hours devoted to filing avoidable accident reports instead of pursuing more important law enforcement duties. Tailgating is neither minor discourtesy nor low level social malaise. It is a critical departure from civilized behavior and tantamount to criminal conduct. It is time to treat it as such and make it an expensive habit to have.
The day has now come for State highway patrols to vigorously enforce tailgating laws across the board, for all types of vehicles. Elevated penalties will have to substitute in the absence of special driver training classes whose successful completion is required to operate a SUV. Similar classes may be needed for pickup trucks and recreational vehicles as well. The ability to afford one of these larger vehicles in no way confers any increased skill of operation. Yet, the ever decreasing safety levels caused by these vehicles goes unchecked. Hefty fines would at least help finance the extra law enforcement officers needed to pursue these reckless individuals. After a few $500 tickets for endangering drivers of smaller vehicles the need for maintaining correct following distance might begin to sink in. Wreckless beats reckless coming and going.
