It was with some amusement that I read David Kerchner’s reaction to Warren Wilson’s complaint about tailgaters. He clearly missed the point and provided a clear example of why as drivers we still suffer from tailgating.

According to Kerchner’s description, there was a police officer who did not take action to pull that driver over until the driver cut him off. By Kerchner’s own description, the driver was already in violation of the “following too closely” statute and should have been pulled over long before, as he was presenting a clear safety hazard to the vehicle ahead. At the same time, Kerchner casts judgment on the driver ahead, as if there is some obligation to make way for every impatient driver who appears on the roadway. It is more likely that the driver ahead was simply keeping a safe following distance from the vehicle ahead (at highway speeds, the recommended two-second gap is nearly 200 feet – the Washington State driver’s handbook actually recommends twice that distance!), and the impatient driver at best would have gotten one vehicle ahead had the other driver moved over.

The fact that the following driver felt it necessary to violate the HOV rules just to get past the vehicle ahead of him is proof enough that the roadway was congested enough to preclude any claim that the vehicle ahead was too slow for its lane. After all, if the lane to the right was empty or had traffic moving faster than the vehicle ahead, the following driver would have simply used that lane to pass.

If there was a genuine interest in improving motor vehicle safety, law enforcement would focus not solely on speeding, but on other poor driver practices, including the much more common, and much more dangerous habit of tailgating. Speeding can be dangerous, to be sure, but tailgating creates situations in which a collision is practically guaranteed should there be any irregularity in driving conditions.

There is no place for impatience on the roadways, and blaming an accident, or even a near-accident, on a driver who is guilty of nothing more than complying with posted speed limits, rather than the driver who was actually driving recklessly, is just plain absurd.

Peter Duniho, Kirkland