Labor Day weekend is about to kick off, and AAA is predicting high traffic volume in New Jersey – the third-highest in the last ten years, they say. All we can recommend is, stay cool.
What is it about getting behind the wheel of an automobile that turns so many people into arrogant fools? "Road Rage" is a common term today, and it describes behavior that is unique to driving.
Consider: You are walking through the shopping mall, and – whoops – you and anther person bump into each other. What do you do? Both of you probably mumble "Excuse me" apologetically, and move on. The entire incident lasts one second and one second later you have forgotten it.
On the highway, when you don’t even bump but only have a close encounter, one or both of you honks the horn, yells out nasty adjectives, and makes hand gestures. Sometimes the exchange of sounds and gestures goes on, and sometimes it escalates further. In the worst cases it ends with roadside violence.
Humorist George Carlin famously spoke about how drivers tend to refer to someone who drives slower than themselves as an idiot, and someone who drives faster than themselves as a maniac. Yet if you encounter someone on the sidewalk who is walking either slower or faster than you, you don’t give it a second thought.
Admittedly, there are times when you bump into someone on the sidewalk and they react in an enraged fashion, telling you off. But even so, it rarely escalates the way that highway encounters often do. And persons who erupt on the sidewalk are generally those with other issues, whereas road rage, to a significant extent, seems to afflict everyone.
When driving, would it kill us to deal with other drivers as we might deal with other pedestrians? New Jersey roads are crowded roads, but most of us get along in crowds just fine when we’re on our feet instead of our wheels. It can’t be hard when on the road to share the space, to think "excuse me" instead of "moron!"
