We designed this survey to give us
information on DrDriving's
main claim, namely that road rage
is a "culture tantrum" and by which we
mean that we are all aggressive behind the
wheel at some time, some drivers less than
others. To us this looks like a cultural
norm, a habit we learn from childhood
through parents, cartoons,
commercials, movies, and the general car-talk that
people like to use when it comes to driving
automobiles.
We love automobiles and we've just completed
our first century of car society. There is
nothing wrong with loving cars and talking
about them, and fussing with them, and paying
out big money for them. At least I think there
is nothing wrong with that. It's our culture,
our tradition, our convenience, our freedom, our romance -- see my
analysis of car
songs.
But things have gone wrong in an extremely
important and critical way and we must
immediately address this problem
which has reached epidemic
proportions and is threatening our
traditional love of cars and our loyalty
to car society. Think about it:
Every year in the US this is happening on
highways with vehicles driven by people:
·
40,000
(forty thousand) dead
·
6
million crashes, each one with consequences
(medical, psychological, economic,
spiritual)
·
250
billion dollars in cost to society (medical,
lost wages and productivity, repairs,
funerals)
·
trillions of
negative exchanges --
between the 177 million drivers who get into
big time fights (1200 each year--shot or
battered), and of small time fights
(insulting each other, scaring one another,
hating one another and breathing revenge
dozens of times in a half-hour commute)
Society's response has been to initiate
·
more
"aggressive" law
enforcement initiatives and new
legislative initiatives to give police
more effective methods of identifying
unsafe driving violations. This
includes drunk driving laws.
·
the
increasing use of electronic surveillance
systems on highways such as the Road
Rage Vans in the State of New York
that are equipped with video or other high
tech equipment to record and crackdown on
aggressive drivers who violate highway
regulations.
However many people feel that we can't keep
increasing this kind of activity to saturation
point without fundamentally altering our
democratic society -- especially because the
fatality rate nationally has remained at
around 40,000 and the injury rate at around 6
million, annually.
It's essential therefore to tackle the
problem through a generational effort that
involves a grassroots movement for lifelong
driver's education through various
means that are available to us.
In my testimony
to congress as expert witness on
aggressive driving, I have specified and
recommended several approaches, including:
·
driver's
education K-12
·
QDC groups
for lifelong driver improvement involvement
by every driver
·
monitoring
and influencing the media for modifying
their current style of portrayal of drivers
behaving badly.
We need parents
to be involved with their children to
prevent them from growing up as the next
generation of aggressive drivers. We need
civic organizations and membership clubs such
as CARR
and YARR, CASAD and SADD, and MADD and the
others now active.
We are in need of a fundamental resurgence
and extension of driver's education and the
value of personal driving standards. I think
this is happening already due to the
aggressive driving epidemic. The phenomenon is
worldwide. And yet it is such a new social
problem that we don't know much about it in an
internal way, that is, from the perspective of
the thoughts and feelings of drivers behind
the wheel.
It's very important that we collect data on the
thoughts and feelings of drivers, not
just their visible actions. The overt, visible
action is always preceded by internal events,
namely, thoughts, feelings, attitudes,
knowledge, emotions, moods. Driving
psychology is this knowledge. We all
need driving psychology in addition to safety
education.
Survey data do not tell us the same thing as
cumulative self-witnessing
monitoring within a QDC. But they
are indicative of how people perceive the
issues and how they try to cope with them.
Surveys tell us about
·
how drivers reason
·
what conclusions they
reach
·
what their intentions
are
·
what they are inclined
to do
·
what they oppose
·
and so on.
They allow comparisons
across geographical locations and across
population segments, as well as across time,
to see changes that might occur in one
location.
More in our book
excerpts || See also: Articles on
Aggressive Driving and Related Topics
|