:: Driving me Crazy... ::

:: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 ::

I think I know why there are so many cars tailgating me- it's not that they're trying to be aggressive to get past, or reading anything in the rear windscreen, or fascinated by the shape. They have no choice- the car itself causes it.

It's magnetic.

It has to be. It's the only reasonable explanation. It came to me after I was nearly side-swiped by two different vehicles in the space of twenty minutes. Granted, the driver of the red Rover 400-series on the M1 was in an animated conversation on his phone and was driving with one hand and 50% attention, and the driver of the large yellow 7.5 ton truck had never even realised there was a car beside him, but it's either magnetism, gravity or stupidity. The car doesn't go fast enough to cause relativistic changes in mass so it can't be gravity and surely nobody's that stupid?

Also, that evening I saw a classic example of why we need consideration on the roads. M1J25 Northbound, there's a line of flowing traffic leaving the motorway. MPV in lane 2 realises that they need to be off at this junction as well, so they start signalling at about the 200m board. Neither the MPV nor the silver Audi A3 would give up the claim to the space just ahead of the A3. The result was that the MPV almost had to stop in the left lane of a motorway where most people were travelling at 70mph or more. I can't say who should have backed off- it seems neither driver had the sense to realise what was happening, or both were unwilling to compromise their postition for the sake of safety.
:: Gary 18.9.02 [+] ::
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