(March 3, 2019 at 6:32 am)PRJA93 Wrote:(March 3, 2019 at 12:11 am)fredd bear Wrote: On my very first driving lesson, my teacher, a mate said " drive as if every other person on the road is a complete pig; this is not true, so that means you usually have pretty fair margin of safety"
In my 20's, with my spiffy little Datsun 1600 (bought new) I did a lot of driving for pleasure, even had girlfriend who lived 50 miles away. Happy times.
Today, I drive about 5000 km a year. My goal in driving is to stay alive and undamaged there and back. What really crumbles my cookies is coming back to my car at the supermarket, to discover some twerp has scratched my car. Scratches usually cost around $150 to get fixed.
I once saw some road rage; at traffic lights; 2 cars ahead: a large troglodyte got out of his car with a baseball bat. What followed scared the living shit out of me. Road rage is rare in my city and doesn't usually involve any kind of weapon..
I tend to give way a lot; don't care. As the saying goes "I'd rather be late than dead on time"
Road rage ends up with shit like this:
Road rage is stupid and can end up with people getting seriously hurt. The guy in the video above is lucky the man in the white SUV didn't run him over and kill him. People are stupid and everyone always thinks they're right in road rage situations, even though there's usually one person who is clearly wrong. I had a woman almost hit me one time on a suburban side street after she failed to yield behind parked cars that were blocking her side of the road. I literally had to jerk my wheel right to avoid hitting her and I turned around to follow her to take her license plate down. She then slowed way down as I was following her and called the police on me as if I was the one in the wrong.
Turns out she ended up getting a ticket (or at least the cop told me) because she admitted that she didn't yield behind the parked cars and that we did almost hit one another. The cop tried to scold me for following her but I quickly shut that down and asked the officer what if she was drunk? Or legally blind and was never supposed to be driving in the first place?
All in all, I probably should've just let it go. Unless I saw someone who was really out of control on the road or unless they actually hit my car, I'm staying out of it. It's just not worth it. You never know who has a gun and a bad temper and might be at their wit's end and is ready to burn it all down because you accidentally cut them off or something. You never know what kind of nut you might be dealing with. Pride isn't worth getting shot or getting beat with a bat on the side of a highway.
Best thing with road rage, in my opinion, is avoidance and deescalation.
"Road rage" is due to the moron getting impatient and dangerously driving and blaming it on everyone else.
Public roads are not private raceways or drag strips. Every accident someone has because of their selfish sense of self entitlement costs everyone in higher car insurance and if injured also health insurance. I see nothing wrong with keeping your distance and waiting to safely pass or safely make a lane change.
