Of tailgaters and shockwaves

If there's one thing that pisses me off when driving, it's impatient drivers. Somehow they seem to believe the interval in-between cars is equivalent to the their speed. That's so outrageously ridiculous, yet tailgaters seem to think you're going too slow if there's a distance greater than the length of one car between the cars.
Gee, if only they knew that leaving greater intervals would decrease accidents immensely. The idea of "longer time to react" is hardly too complex. That's the reason I rarely feel pitty for drivers involved in accidents, because, no, those totally unavoidable accidents aren't that frequent if you always let yourself have at least, I don't know, some 5 seconds to react and bring yourself to a safe place (alright, we'll still be likely to get involved accidents thanks entirely to these stupid assholes, despite of our safety measures).

There's one interesting concept regarding physics of gridlocks that scientists named shockwave. It's a mix of domino effect and chaos theory, because the slight pressing of the brake will make the driver behind brake instinctively and this will eventually result in a total stop of cars there behind. Now, this is a problem we can do something about. We can stop shockwaves from dominoing past us. It's a really simple thing we can do that will make a lot of difference.

If the car ahead brakes, you can stop the shockwave by simply not braking, and try reducing the speed simply by letting your feet off the gas pedal. Of course, for that it's vital to have some space between you and the car going slower than you. It's all about managing the intervals. When not braking the interval will shorten, so you just have to drive a little slowly only enough to "reload" this vital interval between the cars, then the next time the car in front of you brakes, you have a reloaded interval to cushion the continuous speed. Of course, the reloading speed will drive the other drivers crazy, but I usually hope that they are watching the whole process so they can understand it.
Also, a gentle braking to reduce speed (when the interval is going too short for the off-pedal to work) is preferable to coming to a full-stop, so sometimes this is an inevitable act (the car braking ahead may not be due to a stupid driver after all!). You'll unfortunately create a shockwave, so you have to count on the driver behind you to be acquainted with these rules.

Tailgaters seem to think that if the traffic is running too slow you have to drive much closer to other cars. I don't see what law, other than instinct, tells us to do that. Greater intervals are the best, for they even allow other drives to change lanes without shockwaving the lane they're getting into, so everything will flow much better.

I used to get all pissed off with impatient drivers, but you see, this gamification is really relaxing. I can distract myself from these annoying drivers yelling around by doing something both rewarding and helpful. It's really fun to count how many shockwaves I can stop during the average commute.