From: u9060863@cs.uow.edu.au (John Andrew Kokosielis)
Subject: Re: Tailgaters abound!
Organization: Dept of Computer Science, Wollongong University, Australia
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 02:38:25 GMT

geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller) writes:
    


>In article <jimf.715982037@centerline.com> jimf@centerline.com (Jim Frost)
>writes:

>>Unfortunately where I do most of my driving it's impossible to leave
>>more than a few feet of clearance between you and the guy in front of
>>you when you're stopped at an intersection.  If you do you get
>>unceremoniously cut off.


>I admit that I'm coming in partway through the movie here, so I may have
>misread you, but you brought to mind one of my pet driving peeves:  Why 
>would anybody _want_ to leave more than a few feet of space between you
>and the car in front of you?  Not that I think you should necessarily be 
>inches from its rear bumper, but certainly a happy medium can be found.  

>I don't know why, but there's an epidemic in my area (the San Francisco
>Peninsula and South Bay) of people leaving enormous amounts of space 
>between their car and the car ahead of them, or between their car and the 
>crosswalk, while stopped at red lights -- almost a full carlength in many
>cases.  Not only is that a waste of space, which is annoying in principle
>and inefficient during times of heavy traffic, but it often results in 
>needless blockage of adjacent left- and right-turn lanes.  It can also have
>a cumulative effect within a given lane, sometimes making it hard for the
>rearmost drivers in the pack to get through an intersection during a given
>light cycle.

>And to make things worse, I've observed that many of the people who do this
>are very lethargic drivers -- contestants in the Valium Grand Prix -- who 
>accelerate extremely sluggishly once the light changes, creating a rolling 
>roadblock.  Their inefficient use of space offers a certain amount of 
>insight into their general mindset, and I therefore avoid getting behind 
>such people at red lights when I can avoid it, as I do when I observe 
>certain other "danger signs."  But that's not always possible, and it 
>should never be necessary.  

>On my way to work this morning, for example, I barely made it into a left-
>turn-only lane because the driver of the last car in the adjacent lane, and
>two more farther up in line, had pulled that space-wasting stunt and made it
>very difficult to squeeze behind them into the left-turn lane, at the point
>where the concrete median narrows.  There was room for a midsize car in all
>that wasted space, with room to spare!  The left-turn lane in question was 
>completely empty at the time, but their thoughtlessness made access to it 
>almost impossible. I did manage to make it through, but with mere inches of
>clearance.  Had the drivers in that lane been paying more attention to what
>they were doing and moved up a bit into a tighter queue, that wouldn't have 
>been a problem. 

>I'm sure there's somebody out there, finger hovering over the "F" key, who's
>just itching to tell me that it won't kill me to be delayed for the time it
>takes the traffic signal to cycle around again.  Of course it won't -- but I
>submit that situations need not become life-threatening before one is just-
>ified in being annoyed by them.  Traffic has become quite a bit heavier in
>my area during the last several years, so it's doubly annoying to observe 
>bad habits that contribute to inefficient traffic flow.


>Geoff


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>Geoff Miller                    + + + + + + + +        Sun Microsystems
>geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM  + + + + + + + +     Menlo Park, California
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