In article ,
ARW writes:
You know that you are going to get arse ended.

Do you keep your foot on the brakes so that you don't get pushed into
the car in front or do keep your foot off the brake and have two bumps
but of less severity?

I had to make that split-second decision once.
I was stationary in a queue for traffic lights, but we were about to
pull off, so I was just putting car into gear.
Saw vehicle behind approaching sufficiently fast they obviously hadn't
noticed we were stationary, and then it went into a 4-wheel skid when
the driver noticed.

I used the fact I was just going into gear to shoot myself forward and
close the gap with car in front and then stepped hard on my brakes.
Car behind didn't hit, but had turned sideways and was close enough he
couldn't open his door wide enough to get out, so my shooting forward
did avoid a collision.

However, I thought long and hard about it afterwards and decided I was
very lucky, because closing the gap meant I was much more likely to be
shunted into the car in front. If that had happened, I would have been
driving (as opposed to stationary) when hit and it might have been harder
to blame it all on the car behind me.

Given one bump or two, I would opt for one bump, particularly given a
rear ending is much more obviously the other guy's fault than a front-
end shunt. If multiple cars are involved in a shunt, insurance companies
can declare it a "multiple shunt" and everyone is responsible for damage
to their own vehicle rather than the guy at the back paying for all of
it (e.g. motorway pile-ups). It avoids having to have that argument.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]