Driving Theory I

I drive about 40 miles to work each day on 95. It's a bit like being in the movie Days of Thunder, except the cars don’t have ads on them. There is no question in my mind that over my commuting career I will be involved in an accident on I-95. I drive (and am killing with mileage) a very safe car to help me out whenever that accident happens. Maybe that's the way we should all drive: every morning when I get in the car I think to myself "someone is going to try and run into me". Most days it's true.

After driving past my FOURTH accident this morning (and one man being arrested with 4 police cars behind him) I had a thought… I would imagine that a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents is lane changes. Not necessarily speed, and not necessarily distractions (like cell phones) but unsafe lane changes. Now, clearly, if you change lanes at a great speed, or while distracted, or while drunk, the chance of you making an unsafe lane change goes up dramatically. But it is the unsafe lane change that, in my opinion, causes most accidents.

Next time you are on the highway try and span the entire highway portion of the trip without changing lanes (beyond the obligatory merge-on/merge-off). It can be frustrating, but you don't worry nearly so much about being in an accident.

When do I see the most lane changes? When someone decides to resist the flow of traffic. Sometimes someone wants to go faster than the flow of traffic, and thus they aggressively weave in and out of slower moving cars. Alternatively, and far more often on 95, someone decides to go 10-15 mph below the flow of traffic and, like a boulder in a river, they "force" cars to flow around them.

From http://www.smartmotorist.com/acc/acc.htm

NYS Police characterize aggressive driving by the following traffic violations:

• Excessive speed
• Frequent or unsafe lane changes
• Failure to signal
• Tailgating
• Failure to yield the right of way
• Disregarding traffic controls
• Impaired driving

The question then becomes: what causes aggressive behaviour? I'd bet it is people in a hurry. If you increase the flow of traffic on highways you might decrease the number of people wanting to exceed the flow of traffic and, thus, decrease the number of people in a hurry and, possibly, decrease the number of aggressive drivers on the roads. There is certainly no shortage of people looking at this problem, but it does beg the question:

Can increased speed be seperated from, and actually help reduce, aggressive driving? Either way I usually get in the left lane, park my butt 2 car lengths behind the guy in front of me and let others do the passing. I've seen too many accidents to want to weave around in the morning anymore.

-Ed