You don t have to be a horrible driver to get into an accident. In the state of North Carolina, where I have lived for the past few years now, I have never seen more people get into accidents than when the weather is poor. For instance, any time it starts to rain, you can be sure to hear something on the news about people getting into a motor vehicle accident. It s almost as if the meteoroligists have a magic wand that they wave prior to announcing the weather that causes people to just start getting into accidents. When I worked as a police officer, I would sometimes dread going to work on days when the skies looked ominous because ominous skies meant that there was a good chance we were going to get some sort of precipitation. As soon as the weather people came on and announced that it would rain later, I would hear the radio in my patrol car start buzzing with dispatches to various locations where people had just gotten into an accident. It was magical, I swear.
Nine times out of ten, accidents are preventable. That s the definition of an accident if you think about it: “I didn t mean to do it, but it happened.” I would get to the scene of the accident, and the case was always the same: Person A ran into Person B with their vehicle, rear ending them because Person A wasn t paying attention. A lot of the time, we would get people who played dumb or who apparently didn t pay attention during driver s education when the “2 second rule” was being discussed. What do I mean? The two second rule is a rule used in driver s education to educate up and coming drivers about the importance of keeping a safe distance between their vehicle and the vehicle in front of them. One way of doing this is by counting to the number to using some stationary object on the side of the road to gauge your distance. For example, let s say there is a person driving in front of you. You would glance out the window at a fire hydrant on the side of the road. When the person in front of you passed the fire hydrant, you would begin to count “One Mississippi....” until you reached the number two. If you passed the same fire hydrant less than two seconds after the person in front of you, then you are following them too closely.
Another way to interpret the “two second rule” is by car length. Ideally, you should be leave approximately one and a half to two car lengths between you and the person in front of you. If you live somewhere like New York City of Washington D.C. where the traffic is heavier, you should always make sure that you leave at least enough room that you can see the person s rear bumper in its entirety. There are plenty of reasons for not tailgating other people. For one, when the weather is bad, not leaving enough room increases the likelihood that if that person in front of you reacts suddenly, you won t have enough time to react. Additionally, if you are stopped and are right on top of another person, it doesn t leave you enough room with an optional way out in case the person behind you doesn t stop or in case the person in front of you breaks down, etc.
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