Ask the Best and Brightest: Psychology of the Highway Buddy?

4:45am and I’m rolling down a chilly Ohio freeway, cruise control set to seventy-four, Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion saturating the interior with quasi-mechanical music. Up ahead is a GMC Envoy, doing perhaps sixty-eight. I pass him and return to the right lane. He speeds up. I’ve seen this movie before. Yup… settled right into my blind spot and matching my speed exactly.

I poke at the Town Car’s steering wheel and drop to seventy-one. He stays right in my blind spot. I poke at the wheel again and accelerate to seventy-seven. After perhaps a two-second delay, he’s right there with me again, invisible but for the glare in my mirror.

“F*** it,” I said, and started swerving wildly.

Long ago, when I was a novice motorcyclist and still very much in that phase of two-wheeled-ecstasy when young men tend to kill themselves in single-bike interactions with trees and bridge abutments, a older friend told me something that is worth repeating.

“Stay away from trucks,” he said, “if you want to live.” Tractor-trailers are the motorcyclist’s greatest enemy, because they throw retreads off at random intervals. Those flying tire segments can and do kill riders. Over the hundreds of thousands of miles that followed, I expanded that rule to

“Stay away from other cars if you want to live.” Nothing good can happen from rolling down the highway next to another automobile. If you are alone on the road, you are only subject to your own mistakes and the failures of your own vehicle. If, on the other hand, you have company next to you on the freeway, a two-ton vehicle doing seventy miles per hour, you are at that person’s mercy.

It doesn’t matter how well I maintain my vehicle if the moron next to me has bald tires. I may be sober as a church mouse, but my highway buddy may be drunk as a skunk. Other drivers are just plain bad news and it doesn’t take a minute’s worth of contemplation to understand why.

And yet… I notice that I am frequently “shadowed” by drivers on the empty midnight freeways and morning runs that make up my travel schedule. With nobody else around, these other drivers will come as close to me as humanly possible and just stay there. Don’t they understand that they are putting us both at risk? Why not carve your own safe space and stay there? Why slow down, speed up, and wander around, just to be close to the person who may prove to be deadly to you and/or your family?

My friend in the Envoy stayed right with me for the first few gentle oscillations. I imitated a drunk driver, drifting first onto the rumble strips and then cutting back across the dotted-white into his lane. Three times I did that, and each time he dropped back enough to avoid my rear bumper before coming right back into his blind-spot station. I wasn’t surprised; I’ve seen that movie, too.

Time for the major countermeasure. I swung left, then right, screeching the Goodyear Ultra Grips and rocking the Town Car violently on its soft suspension. The Envoy braked hard and dropped back perhaps fifty feet. I accelerated to seventy-eight, putting a full quarter-mile between me and the hapless GMC driver. Mission accomplished…

…until ten miles later, when the familiar glare in my mirror told me that my highway buddy was back. This guy was so lonely that he’d rather shadow a violent, dangerous “drunk driver” than roll the road alone. Faithful companion, highway buddy.

Why?