Akst: Getting intimate on the LIE

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

When I first started driving to work on Long Island, I was astonished to find myself the victim of a remarkable piece of vandalism: Somebody had painted a giant, elaborately detailed sport utility vehicle right onto my rear windshield.

The next day this amazingly lifelike image was gone, only to be replaced by an equally lifelike black Jaguar. The day after that, it was a perfectly rendered white panel truck. I confess it took me awhile -- I'm a little dim -- to realize that I wasn't the victim of some suburban super-realist painter. The much scarier truth was that those vehicles were really back there, close enough to touch, because their drivers were practicing the venerable local art form known as tailgating.

Or maybe I should call it a sport rather than an art. Whatever you call it, I had no idea how central it was to Long Island's culture and economy.

Of course, now that I've been here awhile, I know all about the tailgating classes attended by ambitious young drivers on Long Island, the tailgating clubs scattered throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties, the tailgating videos offered by lending libraries so you can brush up on your skills, and the exciting tailgating competitions held at local high schools and colleges, complete with cheerleaders and school fight songs. I spotted a car once with a bumper sticker that said, "My child is an all-county tailgater!"

Long Island economists have explained to me by now the role of tailgating in the Island's economy -- the extent to which Long Island's tailgating output helps mitigate America's trade deficit, for example, and the way worker productivity is improved by the galvanizing effect tailgating has on people who drive to work in the morning.

In other parts of the country, workers aren't fully awake until nearly noon, but that's not true here. After just a few minutes on the Long Island Expressway, workers in Nassau and Suffolk arrive at their desks with all senses on full alert, adrenaline pumping. It's remarkable that any of them would ever need a cup of coffee until after lunch.

I've encountered tailgaters everywhere, of course, but never as consistently as on Long Island. It's true that at rush hour, you couldn't leave adequate room between cars if you wanted to, because someone would just slide right into the space. They might even signal!

But I commute off-peak and can usually manage to leave a few car lengths open ahead of me. This is important because, if the person in front should stop short, I'd need enough room to stop both myself and the thoughtless jerk riding right on my tail.

I know what you're thinking: that I'm one of those yokels plodding along at 50 miles per hour in the left lane, hands locked onto the wheel in a death-grip, driving everyone behind me nuts. In fact, I mostly drive in the middle of the road, at roughly 65 miles per hour on the LIE, passing some cars while other cars pass me. The problem isn't that I drive too slowly. The problem is that some drivers try to pass me without changing lanes.

Long Island's tailgaters are nothing if not tenacious. Tapping the brakes doesn't help, but sometimes they respond to a thumb jerked backward in the rearview mirror. On other occasions they answer by gesturing for me to move over, since their needs are paramount, and the flow of traffic must part before them like the waters of the Red Sea confronted by Moses.

Given the budget troubles of both Nassau and Suffolk, the obvious solution is a tailgating tax. Then again, what politician would have the guts to tax anything so popular?