Tailgating is the number one thing that I cannot stand when it comes to other drivers, and the thing of it is is that you cannot seem to avoid it. Whether you have someone who is on their cell phone behind you and just isn t paying attention or whether it is a soccer mom who is in a rush to get the kids to wherever it is that they need to go, it seems like those who are most guilty for tailgating seem to think that they can somehow will the vehicles in front of them to go faster simply by riding as close to the bumper as possible.
Recently, I was talking to a mutual friend who was telling me about one of the few instances that she ever received a ticket from a police officer. As she told me the story, she informed me that there was a lot of traffic, and she was in a rush to get to an appointment and the person in front of her was simply going too slow. So, in an effort to get around this person, she got into the lane beside her. However, because there was a lot of traffic, the traffic in the lane that she had just gotten in to began to slow down. Frustrated and seeing how the traffic had begun to pick up in the lane that she had just left, my friend got back into her original lane. However, in her rush to get over into the other lane, she wound up cutting off a police officer who had been watching her weave in and out of the different lanes. The police officer pulled her over immediately and issued her a ticket for tailgating. The price? $200 in court costs and fines all because she couldn t see the importance of being a little more patient and putting a little extra buffer room between her and the car in front of her.
Many people don t even realize that they are tailgating. What typically happens is that the person who is guilty of tailgating will blame it on the driver in front of them saying things such as, “Look at this person! Look at how they are holding up traffic!” Almost embarrassingly, I am reluctant to admit that my own aunt is horrible when it comes to tailgating. I found this out the hard way on the way back from a weekend trip with her. There was not a single other person on this one stretch of road that we were on...except for the poor guy who was inches in front of us. Instead, my aunt became flustered exclaiming that he was in the “fast lane” when he should have been in the other lane. But there was no one else around us! Why did she feel the need to ride the back of this guy s bumper? I shuddered to think about what would happen if this guy were to suddenly step on his brakes. Needless to say, I kept my eyes closed for the majority of the three hour trip back to her apartment.
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