It’s strange, my coworker said the roads were really crazy last night. First light i tunred at, left turn by the way, with green arow, dude ran the red and almost hit me. Is it something in the water?
I think it’s a barometer for the overall mental health climate. We’re any combination of overworked, broke, tired, we got news organizations trying to keep us mad at each other all the time…and then we get on the road where it’s easy to pretend those other metal boxes aren’t filled with human beings.
I’m not above it. I’ve participated in my fair share of road rage parties. And I don’t have any solutions, just observations and memes. That’s all I got.
I mean, you roll up on anyone in an aggressive/adversarial manner, regardless of the situation, you’re more likely to encourage pushback than agreement/compliance. Even if it’s just the perception of aggression, our primate brains are wired to stand our ground. Doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, it’s about locking horns. It’s why online arguments are the way they are.
An important game maybe? Being Brazilian, I’ve always refrained from driving before big soccer games started, like World Cup or championship finals. People were crazy trying to get home.
This is every day where I live. It’s madness. Otherwise, the place is paradise. Beautiful area. People are great here. Until you get them into a car. Then they are inattentive, pushy, and unsafe. People die every single year. Kids on bikes get plowed over. It’s insane.
At a 4-way intersection, if I stop around the same time as a car to my right I always yield to them according to the “right hand rule” of right-of-way. But everyone else wants to go only by “who reached the line first” and they want to time it down to the millisecond. And guess what: they always, always determine that they arrived first.
Funny how that works. They’ve changed the rule from “right of way goes to whoever arrived first, defer to car on your right when in doubt” to “it’s always my turn.”
It’s strange, my coworker said the roads were really crazy last night. First light i tunred at, left turn by the way, with green arow, dude ran the red and almost hit me. Is it something in the water?
I think it’s a barometer for the overall mental health climate. We’re any combination of overworked, broke, tired, we got news organizations trying to keep us mad at each other all the time…and then we get on the road where it’s easy to pretend those other metal boxes aren’t filled with human beings.
I’m not above it. I’ve participated in my fair share of road rage parties. And I don’t have any solutions, just observations and memes. That’s all I got.
It’s deeper than that.
People have been doing this since cars became fast. There’s something in our brains that automatically turns driving into a battle.
I mean, you roll up on anyone in an aggressive/adversarial manner, regardless of the situation, you’re more likely to encourage pushback than agreement/compliance. Even if it’s just the perception of aggression, our primate brains are wired to stand our ground. Doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, it’s about locking horns. It’s why online arguments are the way they are.
So… Aggressivity always escalates if people interact at random without a cooling period?
That’s quite a hypothesis. Seems realistic. I wonder if anybody tested it.
Has it started getting hot out where you are recently? There is always a spike in bad driving when the weather gets nice.
“in these hot days is the mad blood stirring” -Romeo and Juliet
An important game maybe? Being Brazilian, I’ve always refrained from driving before big soccer games started, like World Cup or championship finals. People were crazy trying to get home.
This is every day where I live. It’s madness. Otherwise, the place is paradise. Beautiful area. People are great here. Until you get them into a car. Then they are inattentive, pushy, and unsafe. People die every single year. Kids on bikes get plowed over. It’s insane.
At a 4-way intersection, if I stop around the same time as a car to my right I always yield to them according to the “right hand rule” of right-of-way. But everyone else wants to go only by “who reached the line first” and they want to time it down to the millisecond. And guess what: they always, always determine that they arrived first.
Funny how that works. They’ve changed the rule from “right of way goes to whoever arrived first, defer to car on your right when in doubt” to “it’s always my turn.”