Frontier queue: the driver forcing in, the tailgater, and the filtering scooter
It is 14:20 in August and you have been queuing for the frontier for 35 minutes. Two lanes of traffic converge into one at a barrier about 80 metres ahead. You are in the right-hand lane and have been letting one car in turn from the left, as the drivers around you have been doing. A dark hatchback that has pushed past a dozen cars in the left lane now pulls level with your front wing, indicator on, and edges across. At the same moment the driver behind you - who has been sitting about 5 metres off your bumper for the last kilometre - sounds his horn and flashes his lights. A scooter is filtering between the lanes towards you from behind. Your engine temperature gauge has climbed slightly in the heat and the air conditioning is struggling.
1. How do you deal with the hatchback edging in at your front wing, and what is the reasoning behind that choice?
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Ease off and let it in. Work out the actual cost of each outcome:
- Yielding: you lose a few seconds and one car length in a queue you have already been in for 35 minutes.
- Not yielding: at worst a scrape between your front wing and its rear door. That means stopping in a single-lane queue, blocking the barrier approach, exchanging details in 34°C heat with the engine idling, and waiting for whoever attends. That is a minimum of half an hour and possibly a great deal more.
The trade is not close. There is also a second reason: a scooter is coming up between the lanes behind you. If you hold your ground and the hatchback keeps coming, the temptation is to twitch the wheel, and a small lateral movement is exactly what puts a filtering two-wheeler on the floor. Keep the car straight, let the hatchback complete the move, and do not make eye contact or gestures - neither improves the next minute.
2. What is the correct response to the driver 5 metres behind you flashing and sounding the horn, and why is braking to 'teach him a lesson' the wrong move?
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Ignore the horn and manage the space, not the man. He is reacting to the hatchback, not really to you, and nothing you can do will change his following distance - the only variable you control is the space in front of you.
So open the gap ahead: drop back so that you have room to slow progressively for the barrier rather than sharply. A tailgater's stopping distance is fixed by physics and by his own reaction time; your only protection is to remove the need for him to brake hard at all. Braking suddenly converts your safety into his reflexes, and in the resulting shunt the position of your brake lights and the gap you were keeping will both be examined.
If he tries to force past, let him go. A driver that impatient is better in front of you, where you can see him, than behind you.
3. The scooter is filtering between the lanes towards you. What do you check, and when do you move?
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Before any lateral movement - including edging over to close the gap on the hatchback, or opening a door - check the mirror and then your blind spot over the shoulder. Filtering between slow lanes is a normal and lawful thing for a scooter to do, and it is the movement least likely to be seen by drivers who are watching the barrier and the hatchback.
Sequence it: see the scooter in the mirror, identify where it will pass, leave it at least a metre of clearance, and only move once it has gone past and you have re-checked. Do not wave it through while your own attention is on the hatchback, and do not assume that because you have seen it, the driver in the next lane has. A scooter that has to swerve in a queue has nowhere to go except under a car.