If You Drive Like This, You STINK!

~or~ Austin Tailgaters: It's Like an Extreme Sport or Something

I have a Bad Drivers category on this blog because they stink at it around here. As we were driving back from San Antonio, my Darling Wife took a turn at the wheel and I was freed up to show you how you know you are in Austin. These sons of guns have no clue or else they don't care that they are taking EVERYBODY's lives in their hands, then holding on with just two fingers and running around in circles shaking their hands. We have lots of fatal collisions on the roads in Central Texas. It's a wonder we don't have more. Chalk it up to Grace and good crumple zone engineering, I guess.



The stripes are four feet long, ten feet apart. You do the math.



All of these were taken while we were going full highway speed. 70MPH speed limit and, in most cases, plus as much as they think they can get away with and not get stopped by the Police.



This lot passed us by. I took pictures of the truck tailgating the car in front, then the car behind the truck tailgating the truck, then the car behind tailgating the car behind. You don't need to see the stop-motion cartoon, so here' s the last in the sequence.









Seriously, they almost all do this on a regular basis



It's not NASCAR, people - drafting on the highways is a bad idea!



Do you have any idea what happens in a crash at 75MPH? Neither do these people. Yes, seriously they follow this close.



This is how they avoid collisions. Speed up behind and then jam the brakes.



At full speed and then some.



Tailgating leads to another type of typical Austin dick move: If they don't leave space, you HAVE to get in where you fit in. Then, because you wanted to be going slower than the person you cut off, you JAM THE BRAKES right after you CUT THEM OFF



I think the Department of Public Safety intends this as a sick joke or something. The driving public sure as [deleted] don't seem to pay it any mind.



The typical following distance at highway speed is from 20 to 40 feet. The safe following distance is several hundred feet.