The law doesn’t say how close you should be to the car in front of you at a red light – but you should be farther than you think.Christopher Drost/The Canadian Press
Is there an exact distance that a vehicle must stop behind another vehicle at a red light? If I can only see their front grille in my rear-view mirror, are they too close? I’ve been rear-ended multiple times while stopped at a light, so I’m always quite concerned about this. Often, cars may stop at a safe distance behind me but then they intermittently creep forward until they’re only a foot or so off my rear bumper. I’ve taken to hitting my emergency flashers at that point. – Shel, Ontario
The law doesn’t say how close you should be to the car in front of you at a red light – but you should be farther than you think.
“It makes sense to leave a car length or more,” said Sean Shapiro, a traffic safety consultant and former Toronto police traffic officer. “You need to leave yourself enough room to provide an escape route.”
While Ontario bans following too closely while driving, he said it doesn’t specifically address being too close to a stopped vehicle.
But a gap of one or two car lengths gives you a buffer in case the car behind you doesn’t stop. With all that space, Shapiro said you might be able to steer out of the way if you see another car sliding toward you in your rear-view mirror.
Also, if you do get rear-ended at a stop light, that gap makes it less likely that you’ll be pushed into the vehicle in front of you.
While there’s no charge for stopping too close, generally, if a car rear-ends you while you’re stopped, Shapiro said that driver could face charges including following too closely or careless driving. A driver who rear ends you is also usually considered at fault by insurance companies.
The rules are similar across Canada.
“There is no offence [for being] stopped too close,” Cpl. Troy Savinkoff, Alberta RCMP spokesman, said in an e-mail.
Any time you’re approaching a stop sign or red light, check your rear-view mirror, Angelo DiCicco, general manager of the Ontario Safety League, said in an e-mail.
“If there’s a vehicle behind you, slow down early,” DiCicco said. “This allows time for your brake lights to register in the brain of the driver behind [so they can] slow down early.”
If you’re the first car to stop in your lane, stop at least a car length or two before the painted stop line, DiCicco said. That gives you room to creep up if you need to.
When you’ve stopped, keep checking the mirror to see if you need to move ahead or get out of the way of a car coming in too fast.
“Once all traffic behind you has come to a complete stop, then maybe you can roll up to half a car length,” Shapiro said.
In the 1970s and 1980s, driving instructors said to stop far enough away that you could still just see the tires of the car stopped in front of you.
But these days, that old-school advice cuts it too close, DiCicco said.
So, how do you stop the car behind you from creeping closer every time you inch ahead to try and put space between you?
“You can’t,” Shapiro said. “We’re like cats and dogs – we see motion and we think we can move forward.”
Some drivers pull close to the cars in front of them at stop lights because they think they’ll be able to get through the light faster when it turns green.
But a 2017 Virginia Tech study found that cars took about the same amount of time to get through a light whether they had stopped anywhere from 30 centimetres to 8 metres from the car in front of them.
“We think we can get where we’re going faster [by stopping too close to other cars], but we can’t,” Shapiro said.
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