Has Tailgating Become Too Close For Comfort?

National World - LocalTV

Sheena Hague, Director of Road Safety at National Highways, discusses the dangers of tailgating and the new campaign to highlight the risks and reduce its occurrence.

Transcript

00:00Tailgating is a serious issue on our roads and the National Highways have begun a campaign to

00:05do something about it. I spoke to Sheena Haig, National Highways Director of Road Safety.

00:11I asked her about the dangers of tailgating. When we've looked at the collision data

00:17and on average for a year I mean there's tragically around about 147 people either

00:22killed or seriously injured so it's a really serious issue for us from a road safety point

00:28of view. I think the public are underestimating it and and we recently did a survey and that survey

00:33was around about 1300 people. We did it a couple of months ago and about 40% of those surveyed said

00:40that they they admitted to tailgating and then about 60% said they felt really uncomfortable

00:45when somebody's tailgating them. Why do you think that so many people do it? I think I think there's a

00:50whole multitude of issues you know the one that probably most people think are is people are

00:54time pressured, they want to get somewhere really quickly and they just want to sort of

00:58push their way through. It could be an experience, it could be a lack of awareness and I think what

01:03we really want to do with this campaign is to sort of raise the awareness of it of how dangerous it can

01:08be but equally give people the skill of what to do in that situation and it kind of sort of goes back

01:14to the the days of when you took your highway code theory test. Tell us about the Too Close

01:19for comfort campaign what's the main message that you really want drivers to take away?

01:23So our main message is just the two things of you know stay safe stay back and in staying back how do

01:29you know how far you need to be with a vehicle in front? So this comes back to as I say the highway

01:34code the two second rule so if for example you're on a motorway and you see a road sign up ahead and you

01:40see the car in front past that road sign then you count the time it takes for you to then pass that

01:46road sign so if you're over two seconds you're about the right distance from the car in front

01:52if you're under two seconds you're too close to the car in front so it's just a really simple thing

01:57as you're driving along to see that landmark like a road sign and just sort of test that distance if

02:02you're not too sure. I mean the highway code does lots of things like stopping distances in but I think

02:07the two second code is something that everybody can do every day and it's really easy. So what are the

02:13consequences uh for tailgating? There are legal consequences uh it comes under the careless

02:19driving offence if you tailgate so that means you could end up with either 100 pounds and three

02:24points on your license. Sheena thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much.

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