Road rage is when the other guy actively tries to crash into your car or opens fire. Becoming mildly annoyed, or mildly annoying somebody else, by slightly-too-piggish-or-clueless driving is *not *road rage. It’s piggish or clumsy driving.
Mixing the two terms up just trivializes the serious problems and adds a “cry wolf” overtone to the minor problems. Neither is helpful.
Bottom line, many roads today are overcrowded. Our vehicular personal space is constantly violated. Just as it is in a crowd of people at a large public event.
What we need is some widespread training / consciousness raising that driving in typical (not stop & go) traffic is just like being stuck in a big crowd of people. After a few years, many more folks than now will internalize that message & stop trying to either push their way through, or get angry at the few who do.
But there won’t be an ah ha! moment or a breakthrough. It’ll change just like the attitudes to drunk driving or littering did; imperceptibly at first & only slowly after that. It can be done.
But it sure as hell won’t change until / unless some sustained PR effort pushes for the change.
I agree to a point; in my opinion, the problem is lack of proper driver training.
I agree with this to a point, too - an attitude change is necessary, but your perspective seems to be that there is no particular reason for the problems on the road other than overcrowding, and mine is that drivers have minimal training and don’t know how to drive properly. So much of the problems we encounter all the time wouldn’t exist if other drivers were driving correctly (not cutting other people off, merging properly, signalling turns, leaving proper distance between cars, not driving while distracted, not speeding in excess, anticipating their next move instead of trying to do things at the last moment, etc.).
I do agree that we need widespread driver training and attitude changing, but I don’t see that happening (unfortunately). What I do see happening is car companies designing to accommodate bad, untrained, unskilled drivers instead. It’s kind of looking like a lost cause, the idea of forcing automobile drivers to start taking it seriously.
I disagree. I think people are seeing their cars as “their territory” and are getting all pissy about the invasion of their personal space in a way that is simply not the case in a supermarket checkout lines or standing in line for the movies.
They have something similar to that already. It’s called a “bus”.
I was in the thru lane going straight, light was yellow. Man in the right turn lane decided he needed in my lane, so he (no blinker) came on over causing me to have to slam on my brakes. Light changes to green, man in front of me doesn’t move, because he really wants in the left turn lane. So he sits there until the lane is clear (left turn lane) and he can get over. I am the only person who had time to get through the green light going straight.
This is the kind of thing that causes road rage. This ass should have taken that right turn, then turned around. But no, he’s more important than anyone else on the road.
I try to be considerate on the roads. But it’s a little different, because going too far in accommodating drivers who aren’t on the ball is actually dangerous in itself. (If you’re on the goddamn highway on-ramp, you should be accelerating to highway speed.)
Then too, I’ve seen people dash in front of others in store lines and then pretend to be unaware of the person they’ve got past. It does seem to take a different order of rudeness to do it to people you can readily see as people, rather than “that car.”
That is what I do, as well. I am never in a hurry, and I just don’t like getting into hectic situations. I am not in a race with the other cars on the road, and have always been pretty laid back, so that attitude serves me well, I think.
I wonder if they have the same levels of “road rage” in places like Hong Hong, Tokyo or Bejing?
Part of it is cultural. Americans in general have this attitude that they are the centers of the freakin universe and that we need to get to where we are going RIGHT NOW!!. Combine that with dense, over capacity roads and confusing or bizarre traffic patterns (places like Boston for example), you have a recipe for road rage.
But I’ve also seen people go into a rage when there are barely any people on the road.
They have something similar to that already. It’s called a “bus”.
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Except you have to get to a specific pickup spot, wait for a particular pickup time, and accept being dropped off at a predetermined spot. A taxi is much closer to what an AI driven car would be like.
Originally Posted by Susanann
Road rage is caused by overpopulation, too many people.
I am old enough to remember back when we had less than 200 million people, and there was no such thing as road rage back then.
And no, it will never be cured until and unless you decrease our population.
You can take that to the bank.
Culture has nothing to do with it. I am telling you that we did not have any “road rage” in the U.S.A. back in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s …BEFORE we began to overpopulate. There even was no such word as “road rage” back then. Same culture, same country, mostly the same roads, etc.
Of course we had* some *traffic in or near the big cities, but nobody ever got upset while driving. No real traffic jams - before Woodstock.
I think immediately deporting the 30 million illegals(immediately lowering our population from 305 million to 275 million) , protecting our borders, and ending all (legal and illegal) immigration would be a good start to ending “road rage”. Also the money we thus save could be used to build more roads, more bridges…(…something which has not kept up with the exploding population since 1970). If we do not take these measures, then road rage will continue, it will get worse, and crowding and overpopulating will begin to overflow not only our roads, but also our hospitals, our schools, our welfare spending, etc.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand why road rage did not exist 50 years ago yet road rage now it is epidemic in all of our crowded areas of the USA. Even rats will attack each other if you overpopulate them in a small cage.
So just to recap: Woodstock caused the first traffic jam ever to occur in the United States, and nobody ever got upset while driving before the 1970’s.
I offer a counter-proposal: while the term “road rage” was (reputedly) coined in the late 1980’s, aggressive driving was invented shortly after the wheel. (This being a few years prior to Woodstock.)
This doesn’t seem to make sense - there were certainly bad, selfish, and inattentive drivers prior to 1970, and other drivers angry at them.
Heck, W.C. Field’s 1932 “If A Had A Million” had a segment about this, with W.C. Fields’ character & his wife buying a dozen cars to run bad drivers off the road with and punish them.
I’ve seen archived safety ads from the 1930s discussing bad/indifferent drivers, and when do you think the term “Road Hog” came out (hint - well before the Nixion Adminstration). And how can forget the MST3k send up of the Union Pacific’s 1959 Last Clear Chance - or for that matter the 1940s “X marks the spot”, where Joe Dokes demostrates all the behavior of road rage and MFFY-ism.
Well, maybe it wasn’t called “Road Rage” back then, but if you think there was no people pissed and angry at inattentive or selfish drivers, me thinks your memory is a bit off…:rolleyes:
Sure, just as soon as all the shitball drivers weed each other out. I personally think licensing should including completing an auto-x course in a reasonable manner. Besides (vastly) improving driving skills, it’s quite fun.
Years ago a teenage kid cut me off pretty absentmindedly on the freeway. Finding this annoying, I flipped him off. (Not exactly road rage, but a good precursor)
His response? Pulled a pistol out and brandished it.
Needless to say, this caused me to reevaluate the logic behind flipping people off in traffic on the streets of Los Angeles. Once I realized that it was not worth my life to get into a confrontation on the road (with people who may or may not be homicidally inclined- who can ever tell) I never had an incident of road rage again.
Funny thing (actually not really funny at all) - a few years back there were numerous incidents of folks getting their windows shot out on the freeway. I noticed at that time that people on the highways became a lot more tolerant of each other, waving folks in if they wanted to merge into your lane, refraining from tailgating each other or laying on their horns.
My thought is that once folks realize that road rage flies in the face of self-preservation they will alter the way they react to random stupidity on the highways.
I must be the only person in the universe that rides buses where other passengers have a sense of personal hygiene. The number one complaint that people have about taking the bus is that other passengers stink.