ever wondered of psychology of road rage?
The automobile offers us a means to exercise direct control over our environment.They respond instantly and gratifyingly to our command, giving us a sense of well being that comes with achieving control over one's environment. What happens when someone thwarts our sense of freedom? For example, while driving along in a pack of vehicles, a car in the left lane suddenly darts into your lane just ahead of you. Your foot automatically lifts from the gas pedal and taps the brakes, just enough to maintain distance. At this point, aggressive drivers feel thwarted because they were forced to alter what they were doing. That driver forced you to lift your foot two inches. "What a moron. What an idiot." You feel an explosion of fury inside. It gets very hot. You might even begin to perspire. You grip the wheel harder. Now you've arrived at the decisive moment: you can let the emotion die out, or you can fan the flames with thoughts of indignation and retaliation. Aggressive drivers do not let the momentary emotional flare die down."
But this makes me wonder: Could we do more to prevent and mitigate all this? It looks like we've only started trying to address some of the symptoms - like sending violent drives to anger management classes after they've had an incident - instead of recognizing that something that makes so many of us angry and stressed needs stronger medicine.
At some point we'll have to rethink the whole thing. Cities can't just keep sprawling, making commuting distances longer and traffic at bottleneck worse, leading to increased stress. It's a vicious cycle. The days aren't getting longer, yet on average we spend more and more time in cars. This can't go on forever. How many health problems, like obesity, back pains, and stress-related diseases could be mitigated if we had a society that offered more transportation alternatives like fast and affordable public transportation, more bike paths, walkable mixed use neighborhoods, etc?
Courtesy Howstuffworks.com
this makes me wonder though leave the big changes, what about smaller ones like trainig drivers better in driver education classes or when getting a license, surely we could do that, it wont completely solve the problem but t some awareness and tips on how to do with road anger and stress couldn't hurt.