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by brazzledazzle 3873 days ago
Now, I'm not saying a car's length is an appropriate distance. Generally speaking it should be 2-3 seconds. But I see this idea a lot on the internet, particularly on reddit: I should be unsafe because other people will get mad at me for being safe which will make them do wildly unsafe things.

I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. Police need to start focusing on safety instead of revenue generation. I don't care what some idiot is doing, if you're tailgating them at highway speeds in the lane next to me you're putting us all at risk just so you can get somewhere 3 minutes faster. I don't care if you're upset about the length between the car ahead of you and the one ahead of it. Cutting them off in the lane next to me and nearly causing a reck is insane. We have to stop just accepting that being an asshole is okay and start holding people accountable.
1 comments
Terretta 3873 days ago
On the contrary, its unsafe to not tailgate close enough. Speed and tailgating don't kill, differences in speed kills.

If you are two seconds behind, they could come to a near stop and you can crash into them at full speed.

If you drove with zero distance between the your bumper and the car in front of you, if they brake hard you will have no impact at all.

This is why it's safe for train cars to tailgate.

In my view, autonomous cars will likely one day form trains for higher traffic density and throughput while remaining safe.

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polymatter 3873 days ago
If you drove with zero distance between your bumper and the car in front of you, they will be unable to brake hard, because its trying to stop an extra ton of mass. you're fine sure, but they just ran over that kid crossing the road without looking. or just t-boned someone. and heaven forbid someone was tailgating you too.

autonomous cars can form trains because they can react orders of magnitude faster than a human can to suddenly changing driving conditions.

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brazzledazzle 3873 days ago
You seem to have taken the concept that the larger the differences in velocity the greater the damage and extrapolated more from it than you ought to have.
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