this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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And I will point out that if the car in front of you isn't paying attention and rams a stopped car in the middle of the road, you are fucked no matter what.
Not if you have the following distance to stop, but point taken: a crash decelerates you faster than breaks can and typical following distances are assuming breaking distance, not hard sudden halts.
So increase your following distance. It also has the benefit that it makes it easier to see what's ahead of the car in front of you.
There's pretty much no accident that's unavoidable (barring someone else plowing into you) if you drive defensively enough (assuming good traction and good breaks, but obviously you should increase your following or decrease your speed to compensate for that as well)
Maintaining a stopping distance like that is nigh impossible in a dense urban area. You'd be constantly cut off and causing tons of traffic.
Really? I do it pretty frequently without issue...
You definitely do not.
Okay, random Internet person I've never met, you clearly know my driving habits and how things go when I'm commuting better than me.
I know math, so let's do some of that:
The braking distance of a typical sedan at 70mph is 210 feet. Add another 70 feet for a reaction time and you're talking about an entire football field of following distance. And that's assuming you drive a sedan.
There's simply no way you can maintain that in a dense urban environment. Other drivers will cut in front of you like a waterfall. It's nothing to do with what kind of person you are.
Okay, let's do the math
(I just want to say here that 1: it's entirely possible I'll make an error here, I'm far from perfect and I'll own that, and 2: I recognize my last remark was snide and I was kinda pissed, and there's no real reason to be, so I'm sorry for my tone, and I'm making the conscious decision here to not respond heated but just discussing about facts as I can see them)
I'll go with 60 mph for this since that's what I find commonly tested (people seem to like 0-60, so 60-0 I guess makes sense to them)
Since the general rule is to maintain 2 or 3 seconds of following distance (depending on who you ask), let's see how far that is.
60 miles per hour, 60 minutes per hour, and 60 seconds per minute, so 60 / 60 / 60 = 0.0166 (continuous) miles per second. Multiply that by 5280 to get the number of feet per second: 88.
So, for 2 seconds, you'll have 176 feet between you and the car in front of you. At three seconds, that's 264 feet.
Quickly switching to 70 and those numbers become 102.66 (cont) per second, 205.33 (cont) for 2 seconds, and 308 for 3 seconds.
Just for comparison, I looked up the tested stopping distance for my car and 60-0 is about 120 feet (actually a little less than that). Which is good, but even your average (which I'm not finding a source that verifies that, but we'll assume it's correct) would put the stop at 280 feet for 70 mph, which is under the 3 second distance at that speed.
If you can see any flaws in my logic or math, I'd love to hear it. But I will add that I typically maintain between 2 and 3 seconds, and I'm rarely cut off. If anything, it makes me less likely to be cut off since there's room for someone to get in allowing traffic to move between lanes more easily, and I just adjust my distance in response.
I don't know what drivers are like there, but we have some pretty aggressive drivers here, and other than the occasional asshole tailgating me (which I slow down for to give them more chance to respond if I need to stop suddenly... They don't like that, but tough, I'm not risking my neck for their impatience), I don't really have any problems with it.
If you can't stop by the end of your current vision, you're going to fast around a corner... By the same token, if you can't stop by the tail end of the vehicle in front of you, you're driving too close to them. For the most part, we don't really follow that, but at the very least, if we're not in a middle lane and there's a shoulder, we should at least be able to dodge them if needed.
My point is, just about any accident involving your car hitting another going forward, barring something like mechanical failure or the person behind you hitting you into them, is likely avoidable through more defensive driving and greater (but still reasonable) following distances.
As a side note, I spent several months refusing to drive over 55 mph (in the far right lane at all times, except for the like 2 times I actually had to pass someone) and did not have any issues from it. In fact, it had very little impact on my time to destination, and made the commute smoother since I wasn't having to vary my speed to keep pace with traffic. It also made the drive less stressful and used way less gas. This is in spite of the "common wisdom" I seemed to get from people saying that driving that slowly was far more dangerous.
You drive a Corvette or something?
The only mistake I see is that you made it unnecessarily complicated and still arrived at the same answer but stopped short of acknowledging that people cannot possibly drive on a crowded freeway with a football field following distance.
And if you are?
Run this experiment again at 55MPH and you'll get similar results.
"Just about" is doing a lot of work there. I maintain this particular situation is unavoidable.
Honestly, if the freeway is so packed that you can't maintain at least a 2 second following distance, then you (and presumably everyone else around you) is going too fast. It's a bad situation to be in, and the solution is to slow until the following distance is enough for your speed. If you're going fast enough to need an entire football field to stop, then you should have at least most of that available to you to react in.
As for being in the middle lane, yeah, that does reduce your escape routes. Makes it even more important to have adequate space in front of you.
Regarding the 55 MPH comment, I'm not sure what you're trying to say... But going that slow definitely gives you more reaction time and makes good following distances shorter, and except for traffic that's already forcing you slower than that anyway, you won't be driving too close to just about anyone.
And the "just about" is because I don't like talking in absolutes, because there absolutely are things out of our control on the road. This isn't one of them.
I don't know what part of "that's not possible" and "drivers will cut in front of you like a waterfall" you're not understanding
The part where it doesn't happen, but even with people moving in front of you, you're still in control of your following distance and speed. If they move in front of me, so what? They'll be at the following distance I'm maintaining because they're continuing to move faster.
And even then I'm probably still at or above the speed limit.
So, not only would someone have to cut in front of me, they would then have to match my speed, and then progressively slow down more than me to keep me at an unsafe following distance, and eventually we'll be stopped on the freeway.
But if the driver keeps going, then I'm still where I need to be.
(Note: I still have no problem doing this while maintaining the speed of the general traffic around me)
I've heard your arguments about people cutting in front of you, many, many times, and to this day, having driven in many different locations in many different types of traffic, I've yet to have that happen when doing the things I'm talking about. So you can go on saying how it's not possible and I'll go on doing exactly what you think isn't possible anyway, without issue.
(Btw, my adaptive cruise maintains an even longer following distance at its max setting than I do, and even using that I've not had people do what you've said)
Then you're no longer doing what you said you were doing...?
...what? That's not how distance works? If you're 300 ft behind and someone cuts in 100 feet in front of you, you're now at a following distance of 100 feet. Congratulations, you've just failed the objective. Then you slow down, but that doesn't matter because this happens over and over again as people try to get around you.
No you wont LOL. You're lying.
Are you seriously driving at speeds of 70 mph in dense urban environments....?
Because, speaking as someone who has lived in many dense urban environments, that's insane.
The only time you should reach those speeds is on the freeway, in which case, there's no reason not to maintain safe distances, again, when at those speeds.
Im talking about the freeway, yes.
And you're so worried about people getting in front of you, on the freeway, that you instead opt to drive without a safe breaking distance when traveling at 70 mph?
Again, as someone who has lived in, and had daily hell commutes in many dense urban cities, that's insane.
In your defense, anecdotally, you're clearly not alone in that mentality.
Personally, I found, over many years, that simply staying in the "slow" lane, while keeping a safe distance, never made my commute meaningfully longer.