On tailgating and warnings

Aug 27, 2005 17:44

A while ago, while I was driving to a job interview, I overtook a few trucks on the highway. While doing so, I was tailgated by a woman that came so close, that I couldn't even see her headlights in my rear view mirror anymore. It was extremely annoying, and extremely dangerous too. On the way back, another guy was tailgating me, not quite as dangerously close, but the traffic was a lot more dense: on a few occasions already, the traffic in front of me had suddenly stalled, so I was keeping my distance - and so were the people behind me. But when that tailgater was behind me, and traffic stalled again, he almost hit me - he had to steer to the left onto the extra tarmac outside of the left lane. And that was despite the fact that I had time to break without everything in my car gettign airborne, and time to switch on my emergency lights to warn the traffic behind me.

When I got home, I started wondering whether it would not be useful to be able to warn tailgaters that they are too close. I decided to ask the traffic police informations office about it: is there a signal we can use to warn tailgaters (like you can blink your brights to warn oncoming traffic, or traffic in front of you), and if not, wouldn't it be a good idea to agree on such a signal. This is what I got back (translated by me):

Dear Sir,,

action is often reaction. In our experience, when people are actively responding to traffic violations by signals and/or gestures, it will only have the opposite effect. Often it induces more agression. Our advice in the case of tailgating is to passively bare this, and as far as possible, don't make the overtaking manouvre last longer than necessary. When we as traffic police see tailgating, we will deal with it properly.

I hope to have informed you sufficiently,

(signed)

I'm not very satisfied with this answer - it basicly says that we should let asocial drivers do their asocial things, because they might get agressive. I am very tempted to write back about that. On the other hand, I understand their concern about traffic safety as well, and we really don't need more agression in traffic. But from several surveys we know that tailgating is traffic annoyance number one. It's also quite dangerous. I still think that it might not be such a bad idea to warn tailgaters that they are too close (some will probably not even be aware they're doing it), just by signaling them - not by suddenly braking (too dangerous), or slowing down (that definitely will induce agression).

So I wondered if people on my friends list might have any ideas about this, before I write back to the police informations office.

Any input, anyone?
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