Has anyone else noticed an uptick in aggressive tailgaters lately on the 405, especially late at night?
I was driving home tonight on 405 on a completely dead freeway. Before anyone asks: I was not in the fast lane, I was driving a steady 70 mph in a middle lane, and no, they weren’t flashing to let me know my lights were off, because my lights were on.
Out of nowhere, a car gets two centimeters from my rear bumper and starts frantically flashing their high beams. We are on a four-lane highway with zero traffic. They stay glued to my ass for a full 60 seconds before aggressively swerving around, cutting me off dangerously close, and rocketing into the distance.
If you wanted to do 90, why waste a minute of your life riding my bumper instead of just using any of the three open lanes to go on your merry way?
Not even two minutes later, an entirely different car pulls the exact same stunt. I checked my speedometer to make sure I’m not going dangerously slow or something, still going a little over 70. High beams flickering like a strobe light, riding my ass, trying to intimidate me into doing 85 in a middle lane on a ghost town highway.
Genuinely, what is the goal here? Every night I drive home at the same time around midnight and whenever I come across someone going slower than me I just move over and drive around. It is not that hard.
Tailgating and flashing brights at someone in the middle lane of an empty freeway doesn’t make you look fast; it just makes you look completely unhinged and like you don’t know how to regulate your emotions.
I know nobody asked for my backstory, but last year, I was stopped at a red light when a speeding driver who wasn’t paying attention plowed into me and completely squished my car (airbags deployed, totaled car, physical therapy, the whole thing). At age 35, having never dealt with anxiety before, I spent the following months dealing with random panic attacks behind the wheel when I see cars approaching fast, with the fear that they’re not going to stop. I even had persistent car accident nightmares for a good while. I finally overcame it. But having people pull aggressive, reckless stunts to intimidate random cars on an empty road is nothing short of deranged. Every single other lane is wide open for you to go as fast as you want.
Is anyone else running into this specific kind of behavior on late-night commutes around here, or are people just losing their minds on open freeways?
I have lived in Seattle my entire life and I’m experiencing this more and more!
TL;DR: Encountering repeated aggressive tailgating and high-beam flashing at 70 mph in middle lanes despite completely empty highways on 405. Has anyone else noticed this trend recently?
submitted by /u/robbygenerous
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