In 2009, a “tailgating” amendment was passed into traffic law in the UAE. Offenders, it was announced, would be given a Dh400 fine and have four black points added to their licence. Fair enough in principle, yet I don’t recollect hearing any more about it since – and certainly in my own experience of being able to check the condition of countless Land Cruiser radiators in my rear-view mirror, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference.
I’d not even heard of anyone being fined – until yesterday, when a friend of mine sent me a picture of a fine that he’d received for precisely this offence. I asked him if he was guilty and his reply surprised me. “Probably,” he said. “Isn’t everyone? It seems I’m just the one who got caught.”
Bearing in mind that this chap travels on the E311, or what was Emirates Road, in both directions every single day, and has to joust through the lane-swappers coming into Dubai in the morning and then sit in the five-lane car park heading towards Sharjah in the evening, it’s surprising that this is the first time that he’s been on the receiving end of an electronic ticket. I try not to use that road, because it is pretty chock-a-block at the best of times.
How does the penalty work? It seems to have been set on the somewhat arcane principle of a “three-second rule”, which, in my view, is a bit 1950s for the modern day. Still, if it works, that’s a good thing. The problem is that it doesn’t.
I checked the recommended distances: at 40kph, you’re supposed to leave seven car lengths; at 60kph, 10 car lengths; at 80kph it goes up to 14 (or double the speed from 40kph and double the car lengths). There’s a logical pattern beginning to develop. Except that at 120kph, we’re at 21 lengths, when, logically, you’d think that it should be more. Because that’s where the posted speed limits top out, there’s no recommended safe distance for 140kph, which is the speed that most of the highway radars are set at.
And how practical is leaving a gap of more than 100 metres between vehicles on a busy highway in this region? It’s not in the least practical – there would come a point somewhere in a mathematical model where, if you continued to adjust the gap for all the people who would be overtaking you and squeezing in, you would be going backwards.
Modern cars are far more capable of stopping in short distances and manoeuvring under severe braking than anything from 50 years ago. Most manufacturers will not sell cars that don’t have traction or stability control and non-ABS brakes are a virtual unknown. Where we need work is in the practical understanding of what a safe distance looks like.
It’s reasonable to assume that every driver in the country knows what it’s like to have a four-wheel drive so close to you that you can count the bugs on its windscreen, but how many people know what a sensible distance from the car in front actually is? How big should the car look? How much can you see beyond it? These are the parameters that should be governing how we drive.
Driving standards here are no better or worse, given the density and diversity of the population and the number of cars, than almost anywhere else in the world. We have better roads than most countries and a generally newer “fleet” if you look at the average age of cars in the region. I’m not advocating a reversal of any traffic laws, but it does rather seem that if someone is going to be fined for a driving offence, it needs to be done from a practical perspective with consideration given to prevailing conditions.
I’m all for confiscating the cars of tailgaters, the people who are so close to you that they cannot even see your number plate over their own bonnets, but traffic needs to flow, and if it doesn’t, you have accidents. If traffic regulations become draconian and are implemented in such a way that no regard is given to whether new risks outweigh existing ones, we’re in deep trouble.
We could end up as Australia has, where speeding regulations are so invasive that drivers spend so much time watching their speedometers that they don’t see anything else.
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