How a roadway nerd’s safety message on his pickup went viral, with the help of NCDOT

Mike Lindgren designs roads for a living. For 30 years, he’s tried to help create highways, intersections and interchanges that move traffic safely.

But Lindgren knows there are limits to what an engineer can do if drivers don’t follow the rules and common courtesies. Like passing on the left on the highway and getting over to the right when others are going faster than you are.

So about 8 years ago, he took a white window marker and scrawled a simple message on the tailgate of his Dodge Ram pickup. “PASSING LANE,” he wrote, with an arrow pointing left, and “CRUZ’N LANE” with an arrow pointing right. And for good measure, he added, “BLINKER,” with arrows pointing to those.

Lindgren, a self-described roadway nerd, had seen the same thing written on someone’s truck somewhere on the internet. Frustrated by the disregard for lane and blinker decorum that he’d seen on the highway, he decided to copy it.

“I travel I-40 a lot between here and Stokes County and see the issue firsthand,” said Lindgren, who lives in Raleigh but owns a small farm near Walnut Cove. “So I figured, why not spread a message.”

About once a month or after a heavy rain, Lindgren would redraw the words and arrows on his tailgate. He included a peace sign to signal the spirit in which they were intended.

“I added the peace sign to say ‘I’m providing this message in peace,’” he said. “I’m not trying to yell at you or insult you. I’m trying to inform you.”

And so it went for eight years. Until one day, in a traffic jam on I-40 in Durham, Aaron Schoonmaker came up behind the Dodge Ram.

Social media content for NCDOT

Schoonmaker oversees Facebook, Instagram and other social media for the N.C. Department of Transportation. With his wife driving, he snapped a photo of the tailgate message with his phone.

“I looked at my wife and said, ‘I’ve got to do something with this,’” Schoonmaker said. “I’m the social media coordinator for DOT. This is like content in my lap.’”

Late the next morning, a Monday, he posted his photo on NCDOT’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts with the message: “Let’s be real, when y’all take it up on your own to spread the word of traffic safety, it’s a win. (And that peace sign is amazing!)”

It got a few hundred likes and shares almost immediately, and by the end of lunch a few local media outlets had re-posted it on Twitter and Facebook. That evening, a couple of TV stations mentioned it on the air, and things started to take off.

Schoonmaker can see how often an NCDOT post shows up in someone’s feed, a measure known as “impressions.” He also has his phone set to buzz when anyone engages with his posts — that is likes, reposts or comments on them.

“And my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing,” he said. “My wife was like, ‘Can you silence your phone?’ We were trying to eat dinner, and my phone is just going and going and going. I got up to look at it, and sure enough we had crossed over a million impressions and 100,000 engagements.”

It was grabbing attention on Instagram and Twitter, but especially Facebook, where people from as far away as Hawaii were leaving comments. Most endorsed the tailgate’s message (“Amen” and “Love it!,” were common refrains), though a few dissenters piped up as well (One theme: I pay taxes and can drive in whatever lane I want to).

The post has now garnered more than 16.7 million impressions and about 418,000 engagements, including 37,000 shares, Schoonmaker said. That makes it the most popular NCDOT post anyone can remember.

“By all accounts, it blew our others out of the water,” he said. “We’ve been fortunate to have a couple posts do very well over the years, and this one stands out above all of those.”

NCDOT follows with ‘Tailgate Talk’

When Schoonmaker took the photo of the tailgate and posted the next day, he didn’t know who owned the Dodge Ram or had written the message. For his part, Lindgren didn’t know his tailgate was online until a couple of co-workers sent him messages that evening telling him to check out NCDOT’s Facebook page.

Lindgren, who rejoined NCDOT this spring after 20 years as a consultant, sent a message to the Facebook account, half worried that the post might get taken down when the department learned it involved one of its own employees.

But Schoonmaker and others at NCDOT loved the coincidence. In fact, Schoonmaker decided to ask Lindgren if he’d be willing to cash in on his viral moment and make some other educational posts for the department.

In his first “Tailgate Talk,” Lindgren uses a marker and the back of an NCDOT Ford pickup to explain the “zipper merge,” where drivers in two lanes of traffic take turns forming one lane at construction sites and other spots. That post hasn’t gone viral, but it’s one of the department’s most-watched videos this month, Schoonmaker said.

Next up, he said, could be a fresh video explaining the diverging diamond, an unconventional traffic pattern that improves traffic flow and safety at highway interchanges by briefly directing drivers to the left side of the road. One has opened in the Triangle, with at least six others in the works.

Lindgren says he’s an engineer who doesn’t necessarily relish speaking on camera. But he credits Schoonmaker with making the most of what he had to say on the zipper merge and says he’s game for more. But he doesn’t think anything he does online will get the kind of interest as the original post.

“I love that they created the Tailgate Talk. I think that’s a neat hashtag,” he said. “I expect I may do a couple more things. But I do expect that my truck will be a one-hit wonder.”