I was at a Christmas party recently and someone suggested I examine the tailgater. Tailgating is considered to be a form of aggressive driving (bullying on the road). The unfortunate thing about tailgating is the fact that it is going to continue. The fortunate thing is there are ways to protect yourself from the harms of being tailgated.

The accepted rule for following distance on the road is that you leave 3 seconds between you and the vehicle ahead of you. If you are driving a larger vehicle or you are pulling a trailer, you simply add 1 second on for every 3 meters or 10 feet of vehicle length. So if your vehicle plus your travel trailer is a total of 6 meters in length your following distance should be 3 sec + 2 sec for the length= 5 seconds. To calculate this time interval, pick a fixed object beside or on the road. As the rear bumper of the vehicle ahead of you passes the object (I like to use shadows on the road surface), start counting, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three. Your front bumper should not pass the object before you finish the count. Don’t cheat yourself we can all count faster!!

Now what to do about that pesky tailgater, the easiest thing you can do is to increase your following distance from the vehicle ahead of you. Simply add the tailgater’s three seconds to your following distance therefore you are now following six seconds back. The reason for this is, if something happens you can stop gradually enough for you and your bumper buddy. The other thing that happens is you create a space in front of you and the aggressive driver will want that space and they will pass at their first opportunity. Your problem is solved.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.