BRACK: Slow down, stop the tailgating and fix our roads

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |  The S.C. Highway Patrol won’t officially confirm that the state’s roads are filled with more tailgaters, but all you have to do – at any time of day and any day of the week – is drive a little and it’s as clear as the nose on your face.

All of a sudden as you’re cruising in the middle lane of an interstate at 70 mph, you glance in the rear-view mirror and suddenly you see some idiot who sneaked up on you and is just one or two car lengths behind your rear bumper.  It’s not too long before he (yes, men are more aggressive drivers) yanks his cheap car to the right and passes, then cutting you off as he zips in front of you, only to pull up on some other car’s butt end.  

“We do have a lot more tailgating and we have more aggressive driving in recent years,” observed state Sen. Larry Grooms, the Berkeley County Republican who chairs the state Senate Transportation Committee. 

Tailgating is out of control.  And there’s really not much you can do about it, as best as we can tell, because we have to rely on individual decisions of responsible driving to carry the day.

Creating a new law won’t directly stop tailgating and reckless driving, Grooms said.  But he did note that with more cars on the roads, there’s more congestion.

“More traffic causes people to be frustrated and that causes people to have road rage and it causes people to drive aggressively.”

But driving more recklessly in heavy traffic isn’t a rational reaction and makes roadways more dangerous. So if you have some unsafe jerk crowding the tail end of your car, the best thing you can do is breathe deeply and pull over to let him get to wherever the hell he is in such a hurry to get to.

With the holiday approaching, it’s time to double-down on safety efforts by slowing down, backing off and being careful.  AAA estimates that almost 750,000 people will be on South Carolina’s roads in coming days – an increase of about 10% from just four years ago.

Now, let’s address the real elephant in the room – South Carolina’s roads.  Yes, the legislature raised the gas tax a few years ago to generate more money to fix roads and build some new ones.  And a lot of the big work is being done at major interchanges in Greenville and Columbia.  But everyday roads are a mess, needing multiple millions of dollars to fix everything from potholes to much worse. 

For people who say you can’t just throw money at problems, you actually can when it comes to roads.  Consider that Charleston County last year was happy to have enough money to resurface 25 miles of bad roads – in a county that has 4,000 lane miles of roads.  It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that  the next time those roads might get repaved under current conditions would be in 160 years.

Unfortunately, inadequate state funding for roads causes personal pain, too.  As the Charleston City Paper reported last year in a story titled “Our roads suck,” drivers pay out of their own pockets to deal with roads.  “Driving on deteriorated roads costs South Carolina motorists $1.7 billion a year — $439 per driver — in the form of additional repairs, accelerated vehicle depreciation, and increased fuel consumption and tire wear,” according to a 2022 report. 

So yes, there’s something that the General Assembly can do to deal with tailgating, road rage, congestion and poor roads – spend more money to fix what we’ve got.

Award-winning columnist Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper.  Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.