If you drive anywhere in Scotland, you are surrounded by eejits
There’s nowhere for me to go, that’s the thing. All the lanes are busy. The idiot can see perfectly well there’s a long line of cars ahead of me, all doing the same speed. I couldn’t speed up even if I wanted to.
There’s nothing else for it but to get out of his way. Not because I want to – I’m furious at being treated like this – but because this man’s behaviour is putting every car nearby at risk of a high-speed crash.
I move into the middle lane. As he roars past at God-knows-what mph, screeching up to the car in front, I see that he only has one hand on the steering wheel.
There are some eejits on Scotland’s roads. As you’ll know if you drive, this incident, from last month, is not unusual. Tailgating, weaving and swooping – when people hurtle up the fast lane and then slice across two or three lines of traffic to exit onto a slip road – happen all the time.
I’m not claiming to be a perfect driver, but some people are in a class of their own, making wantonly dangerous manoeuvres apparently believing they are immune to having accidents. In the summer, with many of us driving long distances on holiday, these bad drivers are a menace.
Is it getting worse? A lot of people seem to think so. After potholes and fuel costs, the poor standard of other motorists’ driving is the top concern among drivers in the latest annual RAC Report on Motoring. On the M1 after the pandemic, cameras caught more than 60,000 instances of tailgating in one year.
I know it’s all relative. Driver etiquette in the UK is good by comparison with some countries. We use the horn sparingly. A toot on a horn in Britain is the driving equivalent of a loud tut – a damning indictment reserved for the worst transgressors. There are still plenty of folk who show patience and good humour. People wave their thanks to each other. God, I love that. That’s how it should be.
But there are a lot of dingbats out there. The road safety charity IAM RoadSmart found last year that more than three fifths of motorists think aggressive drivers are a bigger problem now than three years ago. And aggression can be deadly. UK Government figures show that in 26 per cent of fatal road accidents, dangerous, aggressive or reckless driving was a factor and in 30 per cent, drivers were going too fast for the conditions.
I could hazard a guess at why some drivers are so pushy. Being disrespectful has just become more normalised. We’ve become more annoyed generally, fuelled partly by social media algorithms that push people towards ever more emotive tweets, articles and videos. We are being conditioned to feel, not think, to be aggrieved and to express our grievances with minimal self-control.
It's long been known that young men are more likely than other groups to drive unsafely, but my personal if not very scientific observational study reveals that many dangerous boy racers have receding hairlines. This is a middle-aged problem too.
So what’s the answer? Refresher courses. IAM RoadSmart – formerly the Institute of Advanced Motorists – encourages experienced drivers to take a second test to combat complacency and bad habits.
I passed my test aged 17 and had the opportunity to do a course with the IAM for a feature article more than 20 years later. I had no particular expectations of it, but it turned out to be one of the best things I ever did.
It’s like a cleansing exercise. It exposes your bad habits and helps you expunge them. For me, it revealed how patchy my awareness was of what was going on. You have to provide a running commentary to the instructor on everything you see and think. You have to make clear you’ve seen the teenager standing with his back to you up ahead, and the van behind you, and that you’re monitoring the parked cars as you approach in case someone steps out. It certainly cures you of any hubris, in my experience.
The advanced driving test, by the way, emphasises the importance of making progress – driving at the speed limit when conditions allow – because that’s part of being considerate to other road users. But it also reminds you why we have those speed limits and how much stopping distance you need to leave at different speeds (96m or 24 car lengths at 70mph, 14m at 30mph and 6m at 20mph). If you’re going at 70mph and the driver ahead of you passes a telegraph pole, you should be able to count three seconds before passing the pole yourself – which underlines how dangerous tailgating is.
People who think they are brilliant drivers often measure their brilliance by how quickly they can travel[1] from A to B and whether they can do things like reverse park with one hand while drinking coffee and taking part in a work call.
As one former traffic cop told me, those are the ones you have to watch. Research shows that overconfidence reduces people’s perception of risk and their driving performance deteriorates. They do moronic things like tailgating.
I’m convinced refresher courses are the way to make our roads safer. But there are also bumper stickers. “The closer you get, the slower I go.” Or how about: “Back off! I’m not that kind of car”. I also like the biting sarcasm of this one: “Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make your tailgating experience more enjoyable”.
They almost make the case for driverless cars.