Why Are Truck Drivers So Mad All the Time? A Look At Road Rage and Empathy

Lifted truck drivers love tearing up I-95. Your rearview will be all clear, nothing but the miles you’ve travelled melting into the gray asphalt behind you. Then, you glance back just seconds later, and there’s somehow a Ford F-150 all up on your bumper, going ninety, begging you with his brights to just get out of his way already. They bob and weave through heavy traffic, towering over sedans like some sick dictator, bumpers covered in Punisher skulls and American flag stickers.

This is a stereotype I’m well acquainted with. My dad drives a midnight black Dodge Ram, a gigantic truck whose bed towers over traffic. My whole life he’s been a hothead, careening around cars twenty miles over the speed limit. He’d change lanes at a moment’s notice, always hyper aware of tiny pockets hidden in the thick waves of rush hour. He’d regularly beat Google Maps by tens of minutes, strategically speeding his way to some imaginary victory.

Despite the stress of it all, his high-speed style has always been remarkably defensive. He’d never cut people off or cause them to blare their horns in an ugly rage. Although it was dangerous, his driving was smooth, calculated. Sometimes, in his passenger seat, I’d tell him to slow down, that his rollercoaster car was making me sick.

“I haven’t been in an accident in two decades,” he’d tell me. “I know what I’m doing.”

And he was right. He’d been driving longer than I’d even been alive, accident free. No fender benders, no nothing. I, and anybody else who planted themselves in his passenger seat, believed that his years of experience made his dangerous driving a sure bet. Safe.

However, a single moment is all it takes for fatal car accident to occur. One lapse in judgement, a second spent staring a phone screen, the minor droop of sleepy eyelids. Even decades of defensive driving experience cannot save you from the small, otherwise negligible human errors that may take place on the road. Last month, this fact caught up to him.

My dad went quickly speeding around someone, as usual, trying to get into the turn lane he takes to get home. The same turn lane he’s taken every day for the past sixteen years, the same roads he’s known since birth. His front left tire clipped the curb, sending him sliding against the median. The front of his truck crumpled. He slowly lurched to a stop, and the truck was undriveable. Pieces of metal and plastic lay in a sparse pile around the point of impact.

Luckily, my father and other drivers were completely uninjured. However, this tiny miscalculation in distance costed him over $7,000 in auto repairs. This tiny miscalculation, which completely decimated his perfectly reliable vehicle, was made despite his multiple decades of driving experience, despite his insistence that his driving was safe.

If my father had been using safe driving techniques, such as keeping a four second following distance and driving at or below the posted speed limit, he could have avoided this erroneous lane change. If he’d remained calm, patient, and empathetic to other drivers on the road, he’d have been more inclined to slow down, assess the distance between his truck and the curb, and make safe passage home. In his desperation to save a few minutes, he ended up waiting hours for a tow truck and weeks upon weeks for his truck to be repaired.

All of this to say: I urge my peers to improve their safe driving by assessing their bad habits. Reflect on the small, seemingly negligible actions that you make throughout your commute. Things like grabbing your water bottle while your car is in motion, or tapping your phone screen to change the music as you drive. Both of these actions can lead to fatal accidents. Anytime you take your eyes off the road as you drive, your safety is immediately out of your control. You are unable to assess the risks around you, leaving you defenseless against any sudden changes in the road.

Furthermore, I encourage all drivers to be more empathetic to those who share the roads with them. Although we often cannot see the faces of the other drivers around us, it is important to keep in mind that we’re all just people trying to get somewhere. Have the same empathy on the road as you might while waiting in line at the grocery store or ordering fast food at a drive through. Personally, when another driver makes a mistake on the road that initially makes me angry, I turn it into a game of imagination. A woman cut me off in her giant SUV? Perhaps her rowdy toddlers are having a backseat game of punch buggy that got a bit too out of hand, and she’s just trying to get them to T-ball practice in one piece. Humanizing other drivers in this way dissipates all potential road rage, allowing for make calm, safe decisions on the road without danger of retaliation.

Sometimes making up ridiculous stories about others might even make the drive more interesting. For example, the dude in Ford F-150 right up on my bumper, the one flashing his brights? He’s definitely got a hot yoga class he’s just desperate to get to. His wife will kill him if he gets charged that $75 late fee again — you know how it is.