The promised boring lecture on following distance

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

I was driving down the Interstate this afternoon, wondering what I might write up for you today, when I suddenly found myself paying attention to the cars ahead of me. That's because one of them had suddenly crossed three lanes of traffic and cut right in front of me.

Seems some brilliant soul in the left lane had just slammed on his brakes so he could use make an illegal U-turn across the median (using one of those cut-across lanes that are supposed to be reserved for emergency vehicles). When he'd slowed down to almost nothing, the car behind him had frantically slowed down and changed lanes. Slowing down and jerking the wheel over at the same time can be a Bad Thing.

Apparently the driver lost control, because he came careening through the traffic, cut across my bow, and ended up on the right-hand shoulder before he could get the beast going where he wanted it to.

He got in trouble because he wasn't keeping his distance. He survived it, in part, because I was.

Anything moving at anything approaching highway speeds is going to take a while to stop. An eighteen-wheeler is worse than most vehicles that way--forty tons takes a lot of stopping. If you want a chance of surviving a surprise, you give yourself room.

Used to they talked about counting car lengths. They eventually accepted that most of us can't measure the road in car lengths, so they switched to time. By the time I was driving, the standard I heard was to stay one second behind the car in front of you for each 10mph. In a truck that's considered way too optimistic. We're told to stay at least six seconds back, no matter how slow we're going.

You can't always do it, but it's definitely a good idea to try. Today it kept me from running over an SUV. I had time and room to let him slide past me. It made the rest of the day a bit more pleasant.

There. It's over. That wasn't too bad, was it?