Road Rage

Today was my first full day driving my new car (pictures and discussion forthcoming). I worked, then I hung out with my girlfriend until it was time to go bowling. I could talk more about my day, but that's not the point of this post. I was taking Kelly home at about 1:30 AM, and someone decided that tailgating was the ideal course of action. This is the story of that event. It might be a little dry, but I think there are valuable lessons to be learned.

There's construction on Route 288 at night in the summer, pretty much always. I'm not really sure what they're doing. They seem to be replacing whole sections of road. At any rate, one lane is usually blocked off in one direction for a couple of miles at night. The speed limit on the highway is 65, but it was a construction zone and I was starting to get tired, so I was going 60, slowing down for the parts where they're cutting pavement and spraying aqueous concrete on the road. There was no vehicle behind me when I entered the construction zone, then suddenly there was. I don't know what exit it came from, but it must have been flying. Blue Saturn sedan. Stupid. I wasn't up for games, so I kept my slow pace through the parts where there was actually construction, then accelerated to see if I could get a little cushion behind me. Once I got up to 80, I was finally starting to pull away. I didn't look at my top speed, but I probably topped 90 before I coasted back down to the speed limit. By the time I got to the next section of construction, the Saturn had caught up with me. He didn't high-beam me, but he was definitely riding my ass.

Construction ended, and I resumed a normal 70-MPH speed with cruise control set to maintain it. The fool rode behind me for a minute, then decided to find the most annoying places possible to drive around me. I was in no mood for this. I didn't really want to get another gun pointed at me on 288, and I wasn't exactly excited about the prospect of wrecking my new car. This is all on top of my more permanent notion that road rage is fucking retarded in the first place. He sat in my blind spot, so I accelerated. He pulled up and matched my speed again, so I hit the brakes. There were no other cars around, so there seemed to be no other danger than this fool. Once he started matching my speed at 50 in a 65, I decided to hit the flashers and stop the car. I pulled over for a minute and basically forced him to move along. Once the taillights disappeared over the next hill, I decided my distance was sufficient and started driving again. I noticed he got off at the same exit I did, and I saw him turning at a light. I don't know if he noticed me again, nor do I care. He didn't follow me, and I saw him turn when the light changed, so that's all I cared about at that point.

My point in telling this story is to explain how we should all drive in such a situation. I can think of at least two other occasions when I was confronted with a similar issue. There is always a choice to avoid road rage, even when another driver is being an irrational dick and trying to fuck you up. Even if you're the best driver in the world, there will sometimes be someone who hates you just for using the same road he's on. You're (I assume) the one who has the level head and wants to avoid trouble, so you have to be the smart one. It's not difficult, since people who have road rage almost by definition are temporarily stupid.

I guess the key to dealing with road rage is really the key to driving well in general, which is to stay calm and not do stupid things. It's easy to freak out in these situations. I thought Kelly was going to hyperventilate tonight. There's no time for freaking out or doubting yourself. You know what to do. Just get away from the dangerous driver as quickly and as safely as you can, preferably within the limits of the law.

It's important to know these things. Road rage is one of the scariest phenomena of the human psyche. Coincidentally, the road has very little to do with it. Give these people a dangerous weapon in a crowded room, and I have no doubt most of them would issue the same sorts of threats to strangers. Driving is just something that nearly everyone does, often in the wrong state of mind, and that wrong state of mind combined with the high level of responsibility involved in driving is what makes a handful of drivers so dangerous.

For further reading on this topic, I direct you to something I wrote a while back on the topic which was apparently pretty good. I don't mean to brag, but it got good peer reviews and was featured on the site. It's not very long, and yes, I am Frank Lobsterman on that site. Check it out.