As if we needed another reason to stay off D.C.-area roads!

Any regular reader of DCist knows that we love us some mass transit. We love the freedom it gives us to zip around the city with a conscience clear of worries about contributing more than our fair share to global warming and air pollution. Sure, rush hour on Metro is no picnic, but given the choice between inching along some 10-lane highway listening to obnoxious drive time radio and packing into a subway with a magazine in our hand and headphones in our ears, we’d swipe a SmarTrip rather than a gas card any day of the week and twice on Sunday! Now, a disturbing trend on local roads has us asking ourselves if Metro might be more civil, too.

The standard expression of anger toward other drivers in the D.C.-area seems to have progressed from the classic horn-honk and bird-flip. In the past month, two drivers have been arrested on Northern Virginia roads for hurling beverages at other drivers they deemed less than courteous. The problem is, under Virginia law, maliciously throwing a missile, defined as any physical object propelled by any force, is a felony. The woman in the first “McMissile” case, as it has been dubbed, spent 7 weeks in jail before a judge decided she had been punished enough, letting her go with 5 years of probation.

Considering the extensive press coverage of the McMissile case, you’d think that beverage hurling would be the last thing on even the most aggravated driver’s mind. Yet just two days after Miss McMissile was released from jail, a Loudoun man was thrown in the clink for the same offense at a Fairfax intersection.

We understand how frustrating it must be for drivers to sit in traffic that never seems to clear up, no matter the time of day. However, why isn’t there similar frustration with crowded-in Metro riders? Sure, you hear people making legitimate gripes about the state of the Metrorail at rush hour. Dirty looks and pointed remarks might be exchanged, but when was the last time it went much beyond a few sharp words? Metro’s ban on food and drink rules out similar beverage-hurling, but a rolled up copy of the Express seems like it could do the trick, no?

So what makes the difference? Does the auto-isolation of glass and steel somehow objectify other drivers, making road rage seem reasonable? Do riders sitting in a rail car with dozens of other commuters bond over their shared misery? Or are Metro riders just more civil?

Photo by oplesrope