Driving can be stressful at the best of times and especially when the roads aren’t caked in black ice and every stoplight seems like an excellent opportunity to turn yourself and your car into a curling stone. Nevertheless, I’ve always loved driving just for fun and not much has been able to ruin that for me. There has always been one thing, though, that has been able to consistently ruin my fair-weather driving addiction. Or perhaps I should say one kind of person, what I have come to call a tailgating [redacted].
These are basically the worst kind of people in the world. For those of you who don’t know what tailgating is, it’s basically when someone drives so close to the car in front of them, regardless of weather, that they no longer have adequate distance to stop without causing a collision. Now, these kinds of people are the sort of people who I would consider to be one of the most inconsiderate on earth. This can come down to a few very important reasons, but it more or less comes down to not caring about the welfare of others or themselves.
Consider this situation. Someone is driving through campus, this totally has happened to me on many occasions I might add, and they are obeying the 20 mph that surrounds campus and they suddenly have one of these jerks who feel the need to ride the butt of the car obeying the speed limit laws. When this happens, that car in front starts to feel anxiety and pressure to drive a little bit faster in hopes of having this car, who must just love reading and deeply analyzing license plates or something, gives them space. Not knowing that this will fail to sway this particular kind of [redacted], they speed up, but to their surprise the car behind them speeds up to continue analyzing and learning the life story of that license plate they love to be so close to. Now there are two speeding cars and the one in the rear is at even bigger risk of running into the back of the victim car and, as an added bonus to this fun situation, pedestrians are at a higher risk as well.
While I can understand being in a rush to get to classes or wherever one might be going, I feel that there is rarely such a pressing emergency that anyone should ever feel the need to ride the tail of another car, especially when in a high-density area like the University of Wyoming campus. The complete disregard for safety that these people have is really mind-blowing. Even going five miles per hour above the speed limit won’t get you where you’re going any faster in town. On long road trips, sure, driving a bit faster might take some measurable time of the clock, but in town the difference in driving the speed limit and speeding is minimal at best. As an aside, please don’t tailgate others while on road trips or on the highway, either. The higher your speed, the more distance you need between cars and the worse the wreck will be if you do run into the car in front of you.
The complete mental disconnect these people have must be vast. The consideration of other people and themselves must not even compute. It’s a simple thing to think ‘Hey, if I drive faster and ride this person’s tail, I might get in a wreck or hurt someone.’ If no other reason, you’d think they would at least want to protect their car from damage, but instead these people decide it’s okay to get all comfy with other cars all day. Now I’m not saying I don’t like going fast and getting where I’m going, but there is a time and place for unleashing your inner speed demon and it most certainly isn’t in a 20-mph zone smack dab in the middle of our university campus.
Please take my advice, tailgating is never beneficial for anyone and should never be practiced when high volumes of pedestrians and other drivers are present. So please, for the sake of you, your children, your children’s children, and all the offspring you will cause to spawn from the depths of some hellish pit, slow down and stop riding other cars’ tails. Life is too short and precious to rush everywhere all the time. Take it easy and think about others, you tailgating [redacted].
