Some of my family members were rear-ended this week.

They were stopped in traffic when a vehicle coming up behind did not brake early enough. It hit their car and pushed it into the vehicle in front of them. Luckily they were not seriously injured.

After enduring three months of heachaches, a stiff neck and back and four months of physiotherapy after being rear-ended myself, I’m now nervous when vehicles creep up behind me or I ride with a driver who follows the next car too closely.

Lack of distance between cars has become a personal pet peeve.

Two seconds.

It’s what the Ministry of Transportation recommends as a minimum safe driving distance between vehicles. Two seconds when the weather is good, meaning dry roads and there is nothing, such as a large vehicle, impeding the view ahead of you.

The ministry website explains how to figure out two seconds.

”Pick a marker on the road ahead, such as a road sign or pole. When the rear of the vehicle ahead passes the marker count, ‘One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two.’ When the front of your vehicle reaches the marker, stop counting. If you reach it before you count ‘one-thousand-two,’ you are following too closely.”

The beauty of the two-second rule is it works no matter how fast or slow you’re moving. Just pick out any marker and count.

The Ontario Road Safety Annual Report for 2006 indicates that there were 398,385 accidents that year. Of those, 59,221 were rear-end crashes, more than 80 a day!

There are many reasons why drivers don’t leave enough space behind the vehicle in front of them: general ignorance of what a two-second distance actually looks like, trying to “nudge” the next car out of the way by tailgating its bumper at 120 km/hr, not increasing distance to a safer three or four second space in slippery conditions.

The excuse is always, if I leave space then another car jumps in. True. Just let up on the gas and re-adjust. Hitting the newcomer in the rear end is the same as hitting the car you were just following.

I’m not the only one getting annoyed with tailgaters. One blogger posted the picture of a truck sitting almost in his rear seat.

Pretty scary since it takes a truck much more time to stop than a car.

Still, it makes me also wonder how this blogger was able to take the picture while exiting on a ramp.

Two seconds from the vehicle in front: that’s all it takes to make it home or to work safely.

Two seconds to avoid hitting a car transporting a baby which, for safety reasons, will always be in the back seat.

As for my relatives who were rear-ended, their Florida vacation is on hold until their new car is repaired, front and back.

Hopefully the drivers along I-90 will know about and respect the two-second rule.