yep, just get out of his way and let him pass if he is in that much of a hurry. It’s not worth the aggravation nor the possibility of an accident.
and my dad would be SOOOO proud to know I wrote that… lol
2 Likes
I’ve been tailgated in the RIGHT lane numerous times. For example, when the tailgater behind me is getting off at the next exit. He thinks that driving that extra .25 mile at 75 instead of 65 will get him there much sooner. Then you have the “fast lane hunters”: they weave back and forth, looking for empty pockets of roadway. If I’m doing 65 in the right lane and there’s no traffic ahead of me, I’m NOT driving faster. You wanna pass? That’s what left lanes are for.
Oh and please don’t tailgate me when I’m temporarily in the left lane after I’ve moved over for you when I see you on the on ramp merging with us. I moved over as a courtesy. I’ll be more than happy to get back in the right lane when it’s SAFE
3 Likes
Guess I am a more understanding generous nature, Every now and then on a 2 lane road some person loves to hang out in my blind spot, and someone will want to pass the driver, Now i always favored letting anyone go as fast as they want and usually will speed up to give the left laner a chance to go around.
Occasionally I have had the left laner block stop guy match my speed, in which case I slow down enough to let the guy who wants to go through an opportunity to honk and piss and moan at the left laner.
You don’t own the road, and I am occasionally the guy behind the do gooder that wants everybody to go the speed limit, no matter how much traffic is backed up. Crap if you see 3 to 20 cars backed up behind you and an open road in front of you, you are the problem, not the solution
yes, if it is totally open. But if there is 5 car lengths of open space then in front of that another line of cars, then I feel justified staying in that lane. As long as I am moving faster than the cars in the right land, or there is no space to safely pull into the right lane.
2 Likes
I had a pickup truck go after my poor Corolla a couple months ago like that. I was in the right hand lane of a 25 mph two-lane in each direction road, going 25 mph, in busy traffic, and lots of pedestrian traffic w/no sidewalks. In the truck driver’s favor, from what I can tell many drivers go faster than the posted speed limit on this road. The pickup driver thought I should be going faster apparently and started honking at my poor Corolla. I could never figure out why he didn’t just pass me using the faster lane. Eventually he did just that, giving my poor Corolla a dirty look as he passed. Sigh, modern life I guess.
I’ll do the same thing. If someone is hanging on my left for a while and traffic is backing up, I’ll speed up or slow down to break up the bottle neck. Even when there is not traffic backing up, I will significantly speed up if someone is hanging in my blind spot mile after mile. Then sometimes they’ll speed up and down the road they’ll be doing the same thing to me again. I don’t want to stereotype but I tend to think most of these are from a particular state but I may be wrong.
He’s not teaching anyone a life lesson, what he is doing is against the law. If there is a witness, your friend will find himself libel for the any accident he causes and he could end up with a big fine or even jail time. Then who is learning the “life lesson”?
Surprisingly we have a few people on this subject who are defending tailgaters. If they ever do a panic stop and some clown runs up into their back seat they will change their minds. If they live through the whiplash.
No one is defending tail gating. They are offering different ways to handle the situation without having it escalate into road rage unlike your friend Pat.
2 Likes
I had a jacked-up pickup “climbing in the trunk” of my little car on an empty two-lane road and there was a plastic garbage can right in the middle of my lane ahead. The truck driver should have easily seen it over my car, but I guess he was too intent on getting close to my bumper. At the last second, I zigged around it and BAM… the truck went right over it. A once-in-a-lifetime coincidence.
2 Likes
I think they’re complaining about the driver in the fast lane of the vdo who won’t move over and let the truck pass. We don’t know what happpend before the camera started rolling, so maybe that driver is hogging the fast lane on purpose to annoy the truck driver for some annoyance he caused, who knows. The driver hogging the fast lane does have some culpability imo, but doesn’t deserve the treatment he got if all he did was to hog the fast lane. IMO the pickup truck driver should be prosecuted and if convicted sent to jail for a couple years.
Ah, Karma indeed does make a round once in a while … lol …
You don’t get whiplash from being hit by a tailgater. The difference in speed when hit by a tailgater isn’t very much, a few MPH. Its when there is a big difference in speed that you get whiplash, i.e. 30 MPH or more. You don’t develop that much of a speed difference when you slam on the brakes with a car only 20 feet behind you.
I have had three major hit from behind, two of them resulted in fractured vertebrae in my neck. These were not from tailgaters, they were from people well behind me who simply didn’t stop. One was intentional, she rammed the guy stopped behind me at abut 30 mph and caused a six car pile up. Road rage, but they didn’t have a name for it back then. Another was a guy who suffered from an epilepsy attack behind the wheel. The third was on drugs.
But I am not defending tailgating. The idiots who slam on their brakes for no reason are just as bad. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Why would someone slam on their brakes for no reason?
I would imagine there is always a reason. It might not be a good reason, or the reason might not be apparent to other drivers, but if someone does it, there is a reason.
Good answer.
Oh, I had a guy do that to me once. I think he was nuts. Two lane curvy road and he was going well below the limit so I was waiting for a chance to go around him. I guess he didn’t like me behind him and all of a sudden slammed on his brakes coming to a complete stop and sliding partially into the on-coming lane. I think he was going home to whip the dog or something.
The next time that I am in back of someone who is already driving under the speed limit on a clear day, and who then proceeds to slam on his/her brakes before every gentle curve–and on an upgrade–this is something that I will contemplate. 
However, I have come to the conclusion that there are some people who are so insecure about driving–and/or who have so little sense of what safe driving actually entails–that they will slam their brakes on for almost anything.
Quite a few years back, one of my co-workers got a fancy new Volvo wagon, and I had occasion to drive in back of her a few times on the way to work. I concluded that her brandy-new Volvo had a defective brake light switch because her brake lights kept flashing on every time that she came to anything other than a straight stretch of roadway, and I politely suggested that she take her new car back to the dealership to have the brake light switch checked.
A couple of days later, she thanked me for my input, and told me that she had had her husband drive with her the day before, and after just a few minutes he asked her, “Why do you keep slamming-on your brakes?” Until he and I mentioned what we had observed, she didn’t realize that her reaction to…almost anything other than a straight road…was to brake heavily.
And, then we have the case of my wacky ex-boss. This is the guy who would only buy gas for his big-ass Buick a few dollars at a time because “if you tell them to fill the tank, they will cheat you”. 
Anyway…when he drove with passengers, he liked to talk to them, and when he talked, he turned his head to look at his passengers. Every time that he turned his head, he slammed the brakes on. Then, he would look forward again, and he would floor the gas pedal to compensate for his braking.
I used to hate riding in his car because of the constant whiplash effect as Chatty Cathy alternately slammed-on the brakes and floored the gas. Yes, in his mind, he had a reason for what he did, but to anyone with adult-level reasoning, his driving behavior made zero sense.
Ask your friend who likes to pull it into low gear without warning. It’s the same principle.
As for being behind someone who is going well below the speed limit, maybe it is better that they don’t drive faster. I would not want to encourage anyone to drive beyond their capabilities. But they should not intentionally block drivers who want to pass them.
I got behind one last week that was doing 35 on a 55 two lane road. When there was no oncoming traffic, he would cross over the centerline taking his half out of the middle. I don’t think he was doing this to intentionally block traffic, he was just too old to be driving any faster. When there was no oncoming traffic, he would speed up to 40. I beeped my horn and he moved over for me to pass.
Actually, with tongue firmly in cheek, I would respond that I do in fact own the road; at least a portion of it due the gasoline and DMV fees and taxes I pay (actually I saw that as a bumper sticker on old boat ('70s Cadillac El Dorado).
When someone is tailgating me at night, I adjust my side mirrors so their headlights reflect back at them. That is one really nice feature that modern cars have.