Road rage: its time, inevitably, has come

The worst road-rage offenders are suburban commuters.  They're mostly white-collar professionals who try to cram too many things into every 24-hour period -- and who have too little time to get where they're going as a result.  I've already ranted against the increasingly common practice of making phone calls from behind the wheel (see Hang up and drive, March 31, 1998).  But a lot of the same people who can't be bothered to pay as much attention to the road as they're paying to their phone calls, can't get out of bed early enough to get to work on time, either.

One of the most persistent myths about American culture is that we have a national "love affair with the automobile," and that this is some kind of natural instinct, which evolved during the 19th century, when the country expanded westward in covered wagons.  We love our cars, so goes the theory, and it's always been this way.  Public transportation?  That's for socialist, anthill-society Europeans, with their heavily subsidized bullet trains, and for urban Asians, who live in such tightly-packed cities that they have to hire workers to shove them into subway cars overflowing with humanity.  Americans, supposedly, have an ingrained wanderlust that renders us incapable of taking a train, bus, or trolley.

You could take the A-train, but not anymore, you can't

The only problem with the "Americans have always loved their cars" canard is that it's dead wrong -- or at least a gross oversimplification.  At one time, public transportation was the main way of getting around in America.  I grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts, a town that used to have trolleys going all over town as well as into Boston, some 15 miles away.  If you look at the old photographs in a Wayland Historical Society calendar, you'll see trolley tracks in almost every one.

My dear-departed sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Walsh, was a lifelong Wayland resident, and she related that the trolley companies were purchased and dismantled by the automobile and oil companies, so as to force people to buy motor vehicles and burn gasoline.  James Howard Kunstler, in an incisive anti-suburbia treatise called The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1993), explains how this worked:

"In 1925, with the acquisition of the Yellow Coach company, the General Motors Corporation undertook a systematic campaign to put streetcar lines out of business all over America.  GM erected a byzantine network of subsidiaries and holding companies to carry out its mission, using its financial muscle to buy up streetcar lines, scrap the tracks, and convert the routes for buses [which it produced]... In 1936, a combination of GM part suppliers, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire & Rubber formed a company called National City Lines.  Two years later, National City Lines... proceeded to buy and dismantle streetcar systems in San Jose, Stockton, and Fresno, CA.  In 1943, another NCL affiliate, American City Lines, converted trolleys to buses in nineteen more cities."

Kunstler continues, "General Motors' ultimate goal was to replace public transportation with private transportation, meaning the car, and in this they triumphed.  The bus was only an excuse to rip up the trolley tracks."  Within a few years, he notes, "only the lowest orders of society rode city buses.  Everybody else was out on the freeway."

Be that as it may, what we're faced with, as we come to the end of the 20th century, is a landscape filled with far too many cars for the available roads.  This is especially true in surburbia.  And it's not just at rush hour that people drive like bats out of hell.

This past Saturday, Meg and I were out doing some errands -- we went to the paint store, the hardware store, the bank, the mailbox, and the Yamaha dealer (the last stop wasn't for any particular purpose, except to buy a t-shirt and a motorcycle magazine, and to gawk at new bikes we can't afford).  At one point, we were making our way along a busy, congested four-lane east-west suburban road -- a typical Chicagoland boulevard.  I was driving in the left-hand lane, behind a line of cars going around 40 miles an hour or so.  This wasn't fast enough for some of the "supercharged family" types on the road that day -- they were darting left and right, in and out, trying to weave their way through traffic, so as to get to the supermarket 30 seconds earlier than they'd otherwise have done.

That's why they call it collision insurance!

The guy who crunched into the second guy probably thinks he was involved in an "accident," and that it was not his fault -- he most likely considers it the fault of the slow cars in front of him, who weren't getting out of his way fast enough for his tastes. Well, as my first motorcycle training instructor made it clear, "accident" is not a word that should be used in the context of traffic.  "When your vehicle collides with something -- another vehicle, a tree, a wall, or, in the case of a motorcycle, falls over and hits the ground -- that's a collision.  It is not an accident.  You should have avoided it!"  This particular collision was caused by impatience, inattention, and -- in the greater scheme of things -- the fact that there were just too many cars on the road.

These days, with my aging Hyundai in its golden years, I've taken a much calmer approach to commuting than most of the I-me-mine hurry-hurry-hurry-ers -- the types who cut in front of me while I'm coasting toward a red light, trying slow down gradually in an effort to save gas, save brake-pad wear, and just generally chill out.  Why do they have to hurry to get to the red light?  And while we're at it, what is so difficult about getting out the door five or ten minutes earlier in the morning, so as not to have to hurry to get to work in the first place?  Or, on the other hand, what's so awful about getting to work a few minutes late?

I tend to take a somewhat more aggressive approach to commuting when I'm on a motorcycle -- partly because bikes are much quicker in traffic than cars; grabbing a handful of throttle is often the safest way to get through a pile of congestion.  But let's face it: there simply isn't enough room on the road -- the pipe isn't wide enough -- for everyone to go to work at the same time and get there in an expedient fashion.  So why fight it?  Toning down the aggressiveness may get you to work a minute or two later -- but so what?  I find that if I just let a few impatient Type-A personalities blow by me in the morning, I get to the office in a better frame of mind, which makes me more productive.  Which makes up for any time lost on the road anyway.

As regular readers know, Meg and I are working on eventually cleaning up our act and taking it on the road -- specifically, to Flagstaff, Arizona (sometime this year, we hope).  Last time we were out there, we found a disarming absence of aggressive driving, road rage, cell phones, and other abominations of modern traffic so prevalent here in Chicagoland.  Out there, people aren't as driven, impatient, and harried as they are around here -- they've got things in perspective.  Less is more.  People don't try to cram as much activity as humanly possible into every minute of every day.  Instead, they slow down.  Smell some flowers.  Hang up and drive.  Relax.

I'm not against aggressive driving -- on the racetrack, where it belongs.  A lot of race drivers say they feel much safer out on the track, at 100, 150, 200 miles an hour or more, than they do on the road.  Having been to a couple of sessions at a motorcycle performance riding school, I agree completely -- blasting around Road America or Phoenix International Raceway on a big-horsepower machine, I never felt any of the fear and uncertainty I get every day from sharing a commute with a bunch of hurried, distracted drivers.  Given the rate of traffic growth, though, I doubt we're going to see any improvement in the conditions out there on the roads.  It's going to get worse before it gets better -- if it ever does.

Copyright © 1999 John J. Kafalas