Being charitable to my fellow motorists, I guess a lot of them were in a hurry to get home last night and start off the first full working week nice and early, judging by the amount of tailgaters I encountered while driving down from East Anglia to London. At least half a dozen motorists drove very close behind me, full headlight beams on, doing probably about 90mph, forcing me to get out of the way and then watch as these idiots drove at up to 100mph or more. Odd, really, since as Samizdata readers are only too well aware, the UK has become the land of the speed camera. For whatever reason, a lot of motorists seemed not to give a damn about getting a speeding fine last night. But maybe this was nothing unusual and I was just a bit unlucky.
I actually enjoy driving fast along a motorway although I find the strain on the eyes of driving at night, with lots of drivers’ lights shining in my eyes via the reflection off a rear-view mirror, to be pretty difficult after a couple of hours. I can understand the frustration of motorists with a very slow driver who, frankly, should not be on a motorway at all, but tailgating is bloody dangerous particularly when road conditions are less than perfect. In this case at least, I am on the side of the police taking a firm line.
Anyway, after a splendid break spent in the contrasting locations of Malta and Northumberland, I am back at the blogging coalface. A belated Happy New Year from me.
How fast/slow were you going?
Let me take this opportunity to express my hatred of people who tailgate. This practice is genuinely quite dangerous, but nobody ever gets booked for it. Police are too busy booking people going ten miles an hour over the speed limit on a motorway.
Alisa, I was averaging about 75 mph, within the tolerance band for the upper speed limit for UK motorways. Most people can drive up to 80mph before you get into trouble: if one drives over 100mph, you can be banned. Tailgating is bad because it can actually force a driver to break the law to get out of the way of a speeding motorist.
Jonathan: that’s similar to the US then. No one should be particularly annoyed with you for going 75. And I agree about tailgating. I tend to drive a bit faster than average, but I never tailgate.
Portugal….tail-gating capital of Europe.
I drive fast but don’t tailgate. This leaves me vulnerable to another annoyance: those who like to move into the gap that I have left between myself and the car in front, sometimes passing me on the inside to do it.
No doubt when we all have compulsory speed limiters people will drive even closer together.
Absolutely – tailgating is a monstrous offence, no doubt about it.
However, let me just state this as clearly and unambiguously as possible:
You don’t know bad driving until you live in the Far East.
Nonetheless, happy new year to you too Jonathan!
Ha! You obviously haven’t visited Israel then.
Happy New Year:-)
100mph.. we live in the 21century
anyone unable to drive a modern, well serviced vehicle at a speed well above that is the idiot.
what is worse – tailgating, or pootling down the outside lane when the inside lanes are empty? Both can be dangerous, and both are against the law.
Criminal, it’s not just one’s driving abilities. Most modern cars that most people can afford to buy and service well were not built to go at 100 for long periods of time safely, on real life roads not taken out of a TV commercial. Anyone who does not understand this should not be quick to judge other people’s intelligence.
Much as I’m pretty sure he’s an habitual troll here, I have to agree with criminal. The 70 limit was designed for cars being built 40 years ago. To suggest that any car built in the last ten years is remotely unsafe even at 80 or above is absurd. To be perfectly frank if you were in the outside lane of a three-lane motorway at 75 mph, Johnathan, I’d be pretty annoyed if I were behind you. I wouldn’t tailgate you because I’m not a prat, but I would pretty soon find some way of letting you know that I thought you should move over.
On Christmas Day I drove from London to Stoke and back. The roads weren’t as empty as I had thought they would be but I saw some of the best driving and road manners I’d ever seen. I wasn’t hanging around (because who wants to be on the road longer than you have to be on Christmas Day?) but even at 100 or 110 I rarely had to come off the throttle for more than a few seconds before the person in front moved over for me. Either everyone was full of goodwill for once or our motorway network only works properly with a Christmas Day level of traffic. Alarming thought.
On the speeding issue the motorway is one of the few bits of British roads largely unsullied by cameras. You occasionally see the markings for them, but almost never the cameras, except at roadworks. On the motorway you still pretty much need to get collared by a real live copper.
Novus, forget 70. There is a big difference between 80 and 100 (and “well above that”, as criminal would have it), and also between doing a 100 here and there as opposed to doing it routinely. And, like I said, it very much depends on what you are driving.
Jonathan, I do hope you were in the inside lane:-)
Mike reminded me of this comparison an Israeli friend shared with me.
Depends on the road conditions, lighing, visibility, and the volume of traffic, number of lanes, etc. On an open autobahn, in a flash BMW, Porsche or whatnot, I would agree with you. A few years ago, at the wheel of my old man’s VW VR6 Carrado, I wound the motor up to 130mph and it drove like a beaut, no problem. But I have a Renault saloon, was driving in a clogged-up A12 from Ipswich with loads of traffic with some ice around. And driving very fast for long periods of time is hard work mentally even if you have a smooth car. One slight lapse in concentration from you or another driver and you are dead meat.
I personally would lift the minimum limit to 90mph for certain types of road. I generally find that the quality of driving in the UK is pretty decent, so I was surprised last night.
permanentexpat righly mentions Portugal. I thought the tailgating I experienced there was bad.
You don’t know bad driving until you live in the Far East.
Well, being well travelled, I have seen bad driving in many places, and it isn’t restricted to one continent. That thing the Chinese do with overtaking trucks is indeed scary though – I have to concede that. And although I am very fond of Portugal, the drivers are indeed completely nuts. They are amongs the worst offenders in the “overtake you into the space you have left between you and the car in front” stakes, too.
Is there more than one lane? Here in the US the right lane is for slower traffic, the left for faster traffic. I move over for people who want to go faster and I expect the same from others. All this is predicated on how much traffic there is overall and the expected ease there is to be able to move into the right lane. If the traffic is thick, I accept the fact that while the left lane is not going as fast as I would like, it likely is moving faster than the right, and it will eventually loosen up in time, so there is no reason to tailgate or drive aggressively forcing someone to make a risky move into the right lane. So really it’s facts and circumstances.
There are people who CAN move over who refuse to and they are just as bad as tailgaters. The traffic may be relatively loose but they refuse to move over even though there is a line of traffic built up behind them, I guess it gives them a sense of power or that they are holier than thou or they’re just not paying attention.
So it really is a matter of common sense on both sides and not being intentionally rude either way. The Cork is just as bad as the Tailgater, and both are acting selfishly. Really I don’t care how fast people behind me want to go, if I can move over without too much risk or bother, I am more than happy to, better to have them in front of me off to the horizon than behind me. But if the traffic is thick and lane changes are risky, I expect the people to back off until the traffic loosens up – MOST of us would like to be going faster too, but we’re considerate and wait for the right opportunities.
So in a way the highways are examples of how people in transitory modes come into each others’ orbit, stay a while, and move on – sort of an example of what is intended in a free market. And we can do it reasonably and sensibly between ourselves or we can have Mother Government spy on us. Unfortunately all it takes are few bad apples to whom common sense rules and behaviors don’t apply. That’s where you’d like to able to take them over to the side of the road and teach them what their parents should have taught them years ago.
I was also driving last night and being frustrated nearly to death on the M4, M40, M42 and M6. I try hanging back at a safe distance and indicating to overtake, but that only works on alert drivers with experience of the etiquette of continental driving. Certain drivers (not you, I hope) seem to think it’s their job to police the speed limits by driving slowly in the overtaking lane. Others think it’s reasonable to expect one to sit quietly behind them for the 10 miles it’s going to take them to pass the car to their left at the speed at which they are overtaking it. Even more annoying are the idiots (usually driving underpowered MPV’s) who will pull into the safe gap I am leaving while I wait for you (and by the sound of it it could have been you) to get out of my way. I don’t condone tailgating, but if you insist on pootling at 75mph in the overtaking lane, it’s marginally less unsafe than overtaking you on the inside (in a country where that’s illegal, so no-one is expecting it). Though any time you ARE overtaken illegally on the inside by a frustrated fellow driver, bear in mind it’s practical proof that you should not have been in the outside lane at that moment!
Britain is under provided with motorways, but the situation is made worse by people in the outside lane who have no good reason to be there. Very often the traffic density in the outside lane is greater than the combined density of the nearside and middle lanes. The outside lane is for overtaking only. And “overtaking” only counts as such if it’s going to be over in seconds. Going at 75 to pass someone driving steadily at 70-74 mph is just plain selfish.
Most people in the UK treat motorways “fast lane, medium lane, slow lane” setup, despite the fact that the idea is to be in the inside (left) lane unless you’re overtaking.
I wholeheartedly agree that 70mph is an overly restrictive limit for a motorway with modern driving. I try to stick with 70mph in the rain and not more than 80mph in the dark and when crowded, but I do believe that 100mph+ on an empty or uncrowded motorway in good conditions and with a well maintained car is not a crime.
And I have, infuriatingly, been done by a speed camera in the outside lane of a motorway, doing 84mph.
Talking of dangerous road use…
I was recently delayed 2-3 hours because on New Year’s Eve some nutter decided to walk across the A1(M) in Co. Durham. Inevitably he or she was hit by many vehicles and scattered across both carriageways. The cops eventually directed everyone to drive back down the hard-shoulder and onto a diversion. This was at 4-30pm and the road was shut between J60 & J61 ’till 11pm.
Other than recounting this horrible tale I have a point. The government have been considering allowing hard-shoulder driving when the roads are busy. Now 4-30pm on NYE is very busy and if that had been the case here then God himself couldn’t have sorted the mess out.
Slow down when tailgated. That’s what I do. They get the message eventually.
Rob – that was a laugh, but watch some of those videos again, particularly under the words ‘don’t’, ‘know’ and ‘live’. Israel cannot possibly be worse.
As a matter of fact, I just got back from Hong Kong last saturday night only to get a text message from a yankee friend of mine who’d been hit by a car and dragged 20 feet across the road on his bike. He narrowly escaped a broken leg and was lucky to come off with just flesh wounds. He told me the driver grinned at him while the cops were doing their thing.
It got me thinking I might be better off moving to Hong Kong permanently – at least the road infrastructure and driving culture there owes more than a passing resemblance to civilization.
I don’t tailgate, but sometimes, for reasons known only to them, people will drive very close to my front bumper.
My sympathies to you Johnathan for having to use the A12. I’m very much in agreement with you on the matter, the A12 is not an autobahn and however well your car handles, anyone doing a ton on a road featuring junctions like this is insane.
Warning: Politically incorrect opinion and (bad) joke ahead!
On the west coast of the US, we’ve imported a large number of Asian drivers.
The old joke was that the worse drivers were: a) two women in the front seat (driver looking at passenger while talking) and b) an old guy in a Cadillac wearing a hat (bought the lane when he paid for the Caddy).
Today, it’s an Asian woman in a Toyota Avalon.
(Bay area joke) How do you blind an Asian? A: Put a windshield in front of him
Here in Korea, it’s common for sat-nav computers to double up as, amongst other things, televisions. The number of people you see driving around while watching TV is somewhat worrying…
I’m confused. It is illegal in the UK to overtake in the “slow lane”?
So, if you are cruising along at the speed limit in the outside lane and catch up to someone tootling along in the inside lane then you are legally required to slow down and stay behind them? That is, if true, ludicrous. Here in NZ I very often find myself free to travel at the legally tolerated limit (109 km/h) in an empty outside lane while lines of cars tootle along asleep at 95 km/h in the inside lane.
No, there is no such thing as a “slow lane” or a “fast lane”
There is only one lane for driving, the inside left hand lane, all outside lanes are “over taking” lanes.
Legaly unless your over taking another car you shouldn’t be in the outside lanes.
here in the UK we have an ilegaly tollerated limit of about 90mph.
A shame so many motorists do not understand that.
by the way, I notice that you say “here in the UK” and “here in NZ” – er, you seem a bit confused as to which nation you happen to reside. Are you lost?
Speed cameras won’t pick up tailgating, so it isn’t a priority for the cops. I have been tailgated by a lorry which was so close I couldn’t see the windscreen of the lorry in my rearview mirror. I was doing about 70mph, and not blocking a lane. I eventually had to drive at about 85mph to get away from this lunatic.
Rob, maybe it was this guy?
Tailgating is not just on motorways. It happens in town too. A friend of mine was hit in the back of her car and got thousands for whiplash. Sites on the internet are available for anyone wanting to know what to tell a doctor about whiplash.