One day a few years ago I sat watching an episode of Dr. Phil who had a guest on, one with a kind of obsession I think most of us are familiar with. I have not had any experience with Dr. Phil in so long that I don’t remember his show protocols much, but I remember that his guests usually had stories to tell that brought out the psychotherapist in Phil. This obsessive guest did just that. His “story” was about his penchant for teaching drivers a lesson every time he was behind the wheel.
He began this way: “When I am behind a slow driver, even somebody only going the speed limit, I approach the back of their car feeling like they are an obstacle on the road. I get closer and closer to them trying to shame them into speeding up. If they don’t speed up, I flash my high beams and honk my horn.” As the fellow gave some examples of his “lessons” to those he considered slow drivers, his countenance tightened, his shoulders raised, the pitch and tone of his voice intensified quite noticeably, he leaned forward aggressively, inadvertently demonstrating the mechanisms of his anger and his hubris, making plain his extreme arrogance.
Dr. Phil punctuated his guest’s runaway diatribe with this question: “Who in the hell do you think you are?”
It was captivating. With the simplest of questions that have been asked probably for centuries, Dr. Phil, with no softening of the topic, no beating around the bush, had managed to immediately focus a nearly blinding spotlight on the mental state of his guest, a state of mind omnipresent in the cells and fibers of his being that gave him a false prowess of control, of superiority, of the belief that he, with impunity, could exercise his spurious, self-created pseudo right to punish, to endanger the life of anybody he felt was in his way, never mind his own.
The modus operandi of this haughty guest, one shared by growing numbers of drivers with the passage of time, is not uniquely resultant from the same factors in each person who tailgates. There can be a variety of traits and disorders that give rise to this life-threatening practice behind the wheel of the multitude of drivers guilty of this, or it is possible that any individual such person could contain, within, such variety while only employing one of them during any one incident.
The causal factors could be latent within the driver on the surface or deep within. A person who is known to be constantly aggressively impatient might always be in a hurry and always inches from the bumper of the automobile in front, while another person, who most people would describe as easy-going, could surprise us by behaving on one occasion completely out of character.
Like most behaviors that can be studied and typed, there are micro and macro ways to analyze them. A micro approach would be to isolate the factors in any individual exhibiting tailgating, while a macro approach would be examining beyond particular individuals into possible social factors affecting all of us at the same time. For example, a serious fumbling of the economy that put huge numbers of people out of work could strip away the façade of civilization to where practically everybody’s nerves were frazzled to the point of worry-laden impatience. Or a highway construction project that closed 3 of the 4 lanes on a freeway at commute time might engender the same kind of universal frustration-laden impatience.
I would conjecture that every driver who has been on city streets and highways for many months or years has looked in their rear-view mirror and experienced what can only be described as a sudden onslaught of adrenaline produced by the rapid approach of the car, or truck, behind, that comes closer and closer and, finally, diminishes the distance to the point that they can no longer see the license plate of the approaching vehicle. In my experience, to consider it from the macro perspective, I believe, in general and for a variety of reasons, this is becoming infinitely more common than when I first began driving in the 1960’s.
From the micro perspective, I wonder every time this happens what factors are at play in the mind behind the wheel in the vehicle approaching mine. It is possible that the person who gets too close for comfort is simply unaware of the danger that he or she is putting both of us in. It could have to do with a mechanical issue. It could be the person is texting or talking on the phone. It could be the person heard a noise or saw a major distraction and looked away for a moment. It could be that the other driver suffered a sudden physical impairment. Or, of course, it could be somebody similar to the man on the Dr. Phil show.
Even among those drivers that fall into the arrogance groove, there is more than one type. My going at or below the speed limit could touch on the person’s impatience and my simply speeding up a little could ameliorate the situation to the close driver’s satisfaction, recreating a satisfactory and safe amount of space between our vehicles (which my drivers’ education teacher in high school said was “one car length for every ten miles per hour of speed). On the other hand, perhaps this has happened to you: a driver appears behind you ending up dangerously close; you speed up and so does that driver; you further speed up and so does that driver. You conclude that this driver must be angry, impatient and who knows what else, and wants to “teach you a lesson” that you don’t feel you need to “learn”. When the opportunity finally arises for that driver to get around you, the car moves around you as if propelled by a rocket engine.
It can be terrifying to become the victim, inadvertently or otherwise, of the aberrant judgment of a megalomaniac, a bully, a distracted person, a wounded person, somebody who just swore at a spouse, slammed the door, jumped in the car and peeled out on the road to burn off anger, or whatever happens to be inflating danger behind us.
I suppose it could all be attributed to a cultural phenomenon as well. I used to spend a lot of time in Germany on business, driving many places while there. Without any attempt to denigrate our own culture, when it came to road behavior, I must say I felt safer in Germany than here when behind the wheel. I learned there that a person needs to study very deeply to pass the driver license exam in Germany because a thorough knowledge of the moving parts of the internal combustion engine was a requirement. It has been many years since I traveled there various times every year, so it may all be different now, but everything about driving seemed better organized from the quality of the engineering of the roadways, the autobahns, the licensing requirements, the laws governing repairs that must be made to cars, all the way to the minds of the drivers.
Perhaps this has happened to you as well as me: you are in a lane designated as a left-turn lane where the advent of a green arrow signals permission to all those waiting to initiate their turn. You are a few cars back in the line waiting for that green arrow. The arrow appears and one of the drivers in front of you doesn’t notice, doesn’t move, nobody moves. A horn honks, the distracted driver suddenly moves, other cars move. By the time you arrive at the spot where you can execute your turn, the green arrow has vanished and you must wait for the next cycle. Clearly I cannot say that I know how this works everywhere and at all times in Germany, but I can honestly say that in the many years I drove in Germany, this scenario did not occur even one time. I used to marvel at the constant high level of concentration and consciousness omnipresent among the population. When a green arrow appeared, somebody watching from above would have had to conclude that there was some form of non-verbal communication present as each driver followed the driver in front mechanically at the same time and speed, leaving nobody frustrated or stuck.
It occurred to me that the entire perspective and expectations of conscious vehicle driving management were maximally high, evidenced by the fact that there were literally thousands of miles of autobahns with no speed limit whatsoever. To make sure driving could be done safely, the autobahns were always in a state of smoothness; where the roads curved, a brilliantly engineered banking of the road was everywhere it was needed. And at an even higher level of driver feedback information, wherever you drove along a hillside, at any place where a canyon – large or small – appeared, a place where gusts of wind could suddenly challenge your high-speed driving, the authorities had placed wind socks that would tell you immediately if, for your safety, you needed to slow down to remain in your lane.
One time I saw with my own eyes the truth of my speculation about the surprisingly high consciousness of the autobahn drivers. I had been driving there for a few years and was no longer made tense driving over 100 miles per hour with cars all around me, and was doing so near Frankfurt on a well-banked curve, when suddenly a tire blew on one of the cars which caused it to immediately swerve to the left. At that moment I saw a HUGE amplification of the phenomenon I conjectured about when German drivers all seemed connected to each other at green arrow time. Instantly all the drivers in the vicinity of the swerving blown tire person moved exactly the right amount, and exactly at the right time, avoiding the vehicle that might otherwise have caused a hundred-care pileup. For 40 years I have thought about that moment and smiled.
That sudden emergency that could have caused dozens of people to be taken to the hospital, and possibly more to be taken to the morgue, could not possibly have had the outcome it did had there been a few people distracted, or dominated by their egos. To be fair, I must note that the swerving car could have swerved much further and made it impossible for ANYBODY to compensate. With that many cars traveling over 100 miles per hour, I could have been melted into incendiary metallic explosions. No doubt that happens even in Germany in spite of the high consciousness of those drivers.
The drivers we are all familiar with who are the exact opposite of caution and respect can probably be thought of as accidents waiting to happen. In our free country, it has always been imperative that we allow our citizens to exercise their freedom as they choose and we “draw the line” when exercising that freedom jeopardizes the freedom of another by putting him or her in danger. Hence, we must keep our eyes glancing in our rear-view mirrors habitually in order to protect ourselves from the unintended – or intended – actions of a driver behind us. If it happens to be one who feels self-aggrandized with the right to commit with a vehicle what the police consider an assault with a deadly weapon, it is hard not to think the same thing Dr. Phil said: “Who in the hell do you think you are?”
