From: geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller)
Newsgroups: rec.autos.driving
Subject: Re: Tailgaters abound!
Followup-To: rec.autos.driving
Date: 9 Sep 1992 20:20:56 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: purplehaze.corp.sun.com



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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Newsgroups: rec.autos.driving