The Societal Toll of Road Rage and How to Mitigate its effects

Sebastian Bergen

March 29th, 2020

A few years ago, my grandparents left their house to drive to the airport in Florida. I was living in Rome at the time, and my birthday was approaching. My grandparents were going to fly to Italy so we could celebrate together. They’d never make it. While driving on the highway, a road-raged driver cut them off and forced them to stop in the middle of the highway, getting out of the car to yell at them directly. Even worse, coming up from behind them was a truck with faulty brakes, which slammed into the back of the car and killed my grandfather. Ever since that day, I have been acquainted with the concept of road-rage, an issue that afflicts many drivers and has real-world consequences. If road-rage is solved, a large contributor to auto accidents would cease to be a problem. A car is a deadly object, and in the hands of an angry individual, its consequences can be dire.

According to the AAA, road-rage is attributed to deliberate actions taken to harm or injure another individual. Symptoms of road-rage have affected 80% of all drivers at least once a year, and around half of all fatal driving accidents have involved at least one individual displaying road-rage. Most commonly, the visible symptoms displayed are tailgating, violently honking at the horn, and yelling at another driver. Getting out of the car to confront another driver, which my grandparents experienced, is quite rare in comparison, but still is done by 8 million people a year.

These deadly actions can be mitigated if a driver can learn to develop empathy, understanding other people’s situations and/or avoiding confrontation. Many people who experience this issue lack sympathy and take offense to possibly honest mistakes or oversights by other drivers. According to a study, those offenders who took compassion classes experienced a marked reduction in repeated road-rage incidents. Another way to avoid road-rage is to avoid performing actions others might consider insulting or angering. Making gestures or eye contact and visibly reacting are multiple triggers of road-rage, and if avoided, can decrease the frequency or severity of road-rage issues for an individual.

There is no guaranteed way to prevent road-rage, unless everyone takes up empathy classes and can somehow manage their anger. As my grandfather said: “assume every other driver is an a**hole.” Even if you may go to great lengths to avoid a confrontation or to anger other drivers, they can sometimes get irrationally angry anyway, as my grandparents discovered during their ill-fated trip. Yet, if people take a moment to think before they act, and consider that maybe, the person they take issue with could be dealing with stress or a rushed schedule and not a personal insult, the incidence of road-rage might decrease and help alleviate the huge toll traffic incidents take on society.

https://exchange.aaa.com/safety/driving-advice/aggressive-driving/#.XoDge4hKiUk

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/road-rage-what-it-is-how-to-avoid-it#2