Starship encounters don't make a whole lot of sense to me. Maybe in wilderness areas.
Obviously it depends on your galactic view.
But, simply, the bulk of space traffic will be intersystem traffic. Some systems will have more inner system traffic than others depending on how much local exploitation is happening, but truth be told, for many, it's just as easy to "order out" and have stuff shipped than get it locally. All depends, of course.
But that means that most traffic is ships rushing to 100D to jump, or coming in from 100D to dock.
And, most of the time, those courses are preset, and long standing. You're only in system for a few hours, but much of the time is spent accelerating/decelerating, with a long term target in mind. What this means is that once committed, and particularly invested (i.e. you've been heading to 100D for a couple hours), its very difficult to adjust your course to do, well, anything.
So, you may well see blips on the sensors, hear chatter on the radio, but you're unlikely to do anything about it, unless absolutely forced.
"Freighter Sunrise over Bombay, heave to for inspection" "Yes, sir, we'll be stopping in...uh...6.5 hours!" "Oh, uh, never mind." Obviously unless the patrol craft wants to match vectors and catch up.
It's not like an ocean going vessel, where they can just turn (or stop) on a dime.
High G patrol vessels can react, and can react more quickly, but your generic 1G freighter, as fast as they are, once invested in a vector, what took hours to start takes hours to stop. So they don't. The Jump window is (typically) too small to interfere with.
When things slow down, when ships get closer to the main hubs, yea, things are different. But during the long runs in "deep space", you may encounter something, but odds are you'll just keep going.
Add in a universe like TNE, where the fuel is much, much more precious, and you'll see even less of this.
