August 6, 2025 | Justin Clark

RCA in the Fast Lane (But With Enough Following Distance)

Most dangerous place in the world today? Probably roads. Let’s use three TapRooT® RCA tools to analyze a fender-bender accident on a rainy day.

Stopping Distance = Reaction Distance + Brake Distance

Just from this SnapCharT®, we can see there’s only so much our driver has control over. This is a classic instance of an obvious missing best practice, following too closely, and our mentality about it. I drive this road every day, so I’ve thought about this theoretical accident a lot, and I’ve changed my driving habits.

I challenge you, test your reaction and the road’s reaction by making only one change to your driving.

Whatever speed you have, 85mph or creeping along at 10mph, always leave enough room for an 18-wheeler to comfortably merge.

Especially if your area has a jumble of conflicting driving paradigms, here’s what you’ll start to see.

Traffic backed up for miles with no crash suddenly clears up.
Heart rate and blood pressure go way down (once you stop worrying about what other drivers think)
Merging becomes low stress
Get there faster because traffic flows smoothly
Adequate time to react to anything, even sudden all-stops, without the “Knoxville Swerve”
Feel superior because you’re setting the pace, and you are the benefactor

Reckless drivers who would otherwise jam themselves in right before the exit and stop traffic now have a large open space to enter, even right at the exit. No brake slamming, no backups, just nice smooth traffic for everyone because of a single driver.

You’ll start to realize how the principle of suboptimization works. Everyone pursuing their self-interest by tailgating, speeding, and not letting anyone in just makes the whole situation worse. But one single car giving that 18-wheeler room to merge

Allows every other driver to remain selfish, reckless, angry, sad, late, or sleepy a la Let Them Theory (thanks, Mel Robbins!).
Resolves bad traffic for everyone, even the selfish, reckless, angry, sad, late, and sleepy
Makes your commute the entertainment
Ensures you have a huge amount of time to react before a potential crash, so if YOU are angry, sad, late, sleepy, or on your phone, YOU are much less likely to crash.

Happy outcome number two is your gas mileage ↑↑↑. To meet that metric of leaving an 18-wheeler’s worth of merging room, you have to drive slower and more smoothly, even just 4mph over the limit vs. 7 or 10mph. Fueleconomy.gov had this to say about my Mini Cooper.

Here’s my mileage on a one-way trip from Knoxville, TN, to Greensboro, N,C through the mountains.

46.1 mpg out (not shown) and 48.1mpg back.

For daily commuting only, my average mileage for 2025 became 37.7, +5.7 mpg to fueleconomy.gov’s HWY number, and +11.7mpg to combined. MID/SPT is the primary driving mode, Mid or Sport.

Conservative Decision-Making

Driving conservatively saves you hard cash money AND gets you there quicker due to the traffic-clearing effect. Conservative Decision-Making does that: never a bad move, and only requires logical mindfulness.

We in the TapRooT® RCA universe collect best practices that, when implemented, the nearby world benefits tremendously with no meaningful downside:

We stopped killing people
TRIR to near zero, and leads the industry
Uptime went from 70% to 90% over two years
Unplanned outage time went from 40 days to 10 days
We quit backing into bollards
Procedural compliance is at 99.5%, where before nobody even used it

You don’t sacrifice performance for best practices; performance measurably rises, just like gas mileage. True best practices are a step-change in normal operations that eliminate huge issues. Usually, all you need is to give up a dearly-held concept or mentality to vastly improve your status quo outcomes.

Where do we find all these wonderful world-changing best practices? First, in the TapRooT® Corrective Action Helper® Guide, our encyclopedic collection of best practices to fix every root cause.