On Morning Edition today, NPR’s Patti Neighmond looked at trends in road rage, that consuming sensation of anger and despair some drivers get from time to time.
Neighmond’s story took off from statistics collected by the road club AutoVantage. In its study, conducted in 2009, AutoVantage asked its members in the 25 largest U.S. cities about their driving habits, with several questions about ways they react to other drivers on the road:
Did they curse at another driver? Make an obscene gesture? Wave their fist in anger? Purposely slammed your vehicle into another car?
“Oddly,” says AutoVantage official Michael Bush says, “in Washington, D.C., you’re four times more likely to have somebody drive into you on purpose than anywhere else on the planet.”
That last bit obviously left some dangling bait, and in elaborating on his quote, Bush made Washington-area driving habits even more peculiar-sounding.
With New York—surprise, surprise, get those jokes running—ranked as the least friendly city to drive in, “D.C. actually ranked as the sixth most courteous city,” Bush tells DCist. For the most part, we’re relatively friendly on our roadways, as bizarre as that may seem.
“Across the board, D.C. drivers tended to be very average,” he says, noting that about 45 percent of the 1,000 area motorists surveyed admitted to honking their horns in frustration while about 10 percent copped to throwing up a middle finger or some other physical gesture. The latter figure is actually below AutoVantage’s national average, Bush says.
But four percent of local drivers polled said they actually rammed another vehicle in fits of rage; the next highest total anywhere was just one percent. Bush has one possible explanation for this tempestuous outlier: “I would tend to think it has to do with traffic and construction on the Beltway,” says Bush, who lived in the DMV from 1998 to 2008 and calls himself “a driver who helped D.C. gain recognition as one of the friendlier places to drive.” (AutoVantage is based in Norwalk, Conn.)
Overall, however, AutoVantage points to the presence of distracted motorists as a leading inciter of road rage, citing drivers who eat, talk into a handheld phone, apply makeup or text as sources of ire.
Most incidents of road rage manifest themselves with a curt honk, a fist to the dashboard, yelling or the finger, but in D.C., watch out! Forty out of 1,000 drivers just might switch into ramming speed.
Of course, sometimes drivers here go well beyond the rage tap, like the September incident in which Richard Bialczak, a local attorney, came across another car stopped in front of downed power lines. Bialczak exited his vehicle, smashed the other car’s windows, got back in his own car to do the intentional-collision thing, then got out again and hurled the downed wires at the victim.
