How close do you drive to the car in front of you?

now how do you increase the distance between you and someone tailgating you?

Oh! By speeding up!

Which means you may now be going much faster than you want/should, and most likely the tailgater will STILL be riding your ass.

Some people just aren't happy unless they are as close as possible to the car in front of them, regardless of the # of lanes or # of cars on the road.

I've been on a 3 lane one way highway, with maybe four cars within sight, and someone felt the need to drive way too close, wasn't getting off any exit, just needed another car as a security blanket.

yes little car or huge SUV behind me., you're not alone, I'm right here in front of you......I know it's lonely out here with only 2 other lanes you could be in, just you stay close.

approaching toronto on highway 401 (three lanes widening to four) , there are some interesting roadsigns posted :
"stay at least two chevrons behind the preceding car ".

sure hope you know what "chevrons are" - here is one ^ !
these chevrons are painted on the pavement , so in the winter (august to july , ha, ha ) they are obscured by snow ! that's what we call improving traffic safety in ontario ! hbg

I guess I should have worded this a little more clearly for the obvious impared.

I was tought to increase the distance between my vehicle and the vehicle in front of me if there is a third vehicle tailgating me. This is meant to allow more time and distance to brake and come to a stop if something happens in front of you thus preventing the vehicle behind you from rear ending you.

For the spelling impared, it's spelled impaired. Oh, and taught, not tought.

So nice to meet you maxpower, perhaps we can continue nit-picking some other time.

Chai Tea,

I wasn't nit picking, just responding. I thought I was clear in the original post but obviously not. I just thought it was obvious that the increased distance would be between you and the car in front of you. It would be nearly impossible to keep a safe distance between you and a car behind you. Especially if you have some nut job that wants to go 100 mph.

Sorry for the typos and mis spellings. Sometimes I type faster than I think and forget to double check if I happen to be in a hurry. Nice to meet you as well.

Truce.

One time I was driving 35 on a 30 road. A tailgater was right on my ass. Suddenly he passed me on a winding road! I briefly thought "If I speed up now I could kill this guy". But better sense prevailed and I slowed to let him make his assinine and dangerous pass.

Oh yeah, I've had that happen. It's strange, for almost a second you want to press your foot on the gas, and then you think "What am I doing!"

On the other hand, I've been in situations where you have to take a fork either to the left or the right, you're signaling away and somebody who I guess feels it would be an insult to their manhood (or personhood I should say) to let you in.

That's when I'm thinking "hey, this isn't a competition, I'm just trying to move down the road to somewhere else I wanna be, same as you"

Actually, within the last year, I was in this situation, 2 lanes split off to place you on a larger highway, and the split put you either going north or south.

It's a tricky situation, because sometimes you have to get on this little split feeder road, from the right side, and you have very little distance to switch into the left lane, if you need to split that way (poor planning at the highway dept).

Anyway, I needed to do this switchover, looked in both my rear view and side mirror, could see some SUV, but had plenty of room to get in, signals going, gliding my car in so he'd know my intention.

Well, I am MORE than halfway into the left lane, when the SUV decides I shouldn't be allowed to get into that lane and get onto the south bound highway.
He speeds up abruptly, gets into the breakdown lane (which is less than half the width of his vehicle), and zooms up beside me. I swear he couldn't have had more than an inch between him and the concrete barrier, which btw was about 3 stories high where we were, and another inch between his SUV and me.
I could swerve back into the right lane, because now another car was moving up there (totally innocent). And to top it all off, I'm careening at about 45-50 mph toward the wall that separates the 2 lanes.
Can you picture it?
I'm breaking hard, and thank God he kept going fast, because I barely missed the wall and the SUV.

It was really obvious he didn't care if I got killed or not.

Of course you know what happened next.....Before that road enters the highway, there's a stop light. Guess who's at the stop light when I come pulling up.

Seriously - Why do people do that?

I didn't want to engage this maniac, but I glanced over a couple of times.
There was a women in the SUV with him who was giving him holy hell.
At least I got that.

Hey maxpower - no harm no foul. You're a righteous dude.

my mind works in convuluted ways anyway.

I had a situation where I was cut off by a tractor trailer truck. He missed my front bumper by what seemed to be inches. He was driving in the left hand lane on a divided highway, speeding and weaving in and out of traffic. In our state, commercial vehicles are prohibited from traveling in the left lane unless there are only two lanes.

This was when I was a teenager and didn't know any better. I got angry and passed him gesturing the universal hand signal that everyone in the world knows no matter what language you speak. And it wasn't hello.

He got even more angry and started driving like a mad man to try to catch me, cutting off more drivers, driving down the breakdown lane, etc. Luckily, I had to pull off the highway at the next exit anyway but I'm pretty sure he wanted to kill me. Yet another example of someone simply not caring. I also, regrettably, fell into that category for a moment due to my road rage.

I have since learned that patience will get you further than a quick temper and not just while driving. But not everyone has learned that lesson.

I'll say it again, there are two situations on multi-lane highways, and two kinds of bad behavior, both equally base and vile.

One is the situation of people tailgating when there are cars as far as the eye can see in all lanes and no rational way to think anybody's going to get there more than a second or two faster by passing anybody. That's abominable.

The second is blocking up the left lane for no rational reason when there are people who'd like to proceed faster than you are and nothing in front of you. That's worse than abominable. Do that in Germany, and you'll be lucky if the cops get to you before the other drivers do.

Why did you have to say it again?

I had a lady tailgating me once and I pulled over the let her by. She drove past me at the speed of sound as I flashed a finger. She seemed pretty mortified when I caught up to her at a stop light 20 miles down the road.

That was a GREAT laugh -thanks. I think I can do one better...when I went into laber with my son my grandmother inlaw drove us to the hospital, upon entering the freeway she came to a dead stop! My eyes poped out of my head, the breath left my body, and I began to shake uncontrolably. I heard someone scream DRIVE, DRIVE...it was me, thank god it was two o'clock in the morning.
-Queen

Close enough to bump them NASCAR style and get them out of the way

i figure this will keep tailgaters off my ass