#RoadRage

Most of the time I am a genial fellow. Laidback. Not particularly quick to anger. Polite towards my fellow man.

Except, on occasion, when behind the wheel.

There’s a long list of things other drivers do that piss us off. It’s longer than long. If written on parchment, the scroll would unroll past the horizon, then drop of the edge of the earth, plummeting through the weightless vacuum of space for all eternity.

Yesterday, or perhaps the day before (who keep track of days? It’s 2018), I was reminded of a challenger for the “Biggest Dick Move” podium. It’s one you’re probably all too well aware of.

You’re waiting at a light, the light goes green, and suddenly…

Warm spring weather seems to have motorists in northern New Jersey acting on their not-so-best behavior. So much so, that a local American Automobile Association branch has issued a plea urging motorists to avoid road rage and “resulting driver confrontations.”

The Situation needs to simmer down.

Duck. And. Cover.

In these politically correct times, where microaggressions and mansplaining — perhaps even manspreading — can ruin a career faster than you can say “culturally appropriated Halloween costume,” Hyundai has done the unthinkable. The automaker conducted a study to find out which gender fares better when it comes to anger behind the wheel, and the fairer sex lost.

Divisive? Perhaps, but the study also reveals the many things that unite us all.

The forecast, to misquote Robert Cray, called for rain — but I saddled up the Anniversary VFR anyway. There’s no lane-splitting in Ohio, but there are still real and tangible benefits to riding a motorcycle on my daily commute to work. The first is time. I save between 10 and 20 round-trip minutes every day that I leave the Accord in the driveway. I can make better pace on the road, particularly downtown. The second benefit is financial: it’s $50 a year to park the bike but it’s between $9 and $18 a day to park a car. The last, and most important, is hassle. It’s an easy three minute walk from my bike to my office. From the nearest available parking garage? Ten minutes if I’m lucky, 20 if that garage is full, plus 10 flights of stairs each way on two legs that ache and crack in any weather below tropical.

Put all of that together, and it’s no wonder that I won’t drive unless there’s heavy standing water or ice on the roads. But I won’t lie; I’d ride even if it cost more. I feel less like a replaceable cog in a massive and directionless corporate cluster-bang when I’m on two wheels. And that’s why I was in a good mood when I heard the BLEAT! of the horn next to me.

A study of self-reported aggressive driving behavior finds that your neighbor, brother, wife and child are angry and violent behind the wheel. But not you.

The statistics found in the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s report are alarming, and, without stating it explicitly, advocate for more yoga. According to the study, almost 80 percent of U.S. drivers displayed at least one incident of “significant” aggression, anger or road rage during the past year.

The difference between genius and stupidity, they say, is that there is a limit to genius. How else can you can explain the latest brake checking crash video making the rounds?

But if you’re willing to limit your stupidity just a tiny bit, you can avoid being the next fellow who finds out the hard way about those steel cables in the middle of the freeway.

It’s common for younger and more progressive members of the B&B to lambaste me as a sort of grunting throwback to a past that never truly existed, a Triceratops grazing contentedly through a field of single mothers, pernambuco-necked guitars, and filets mignon while the participation-trophy-shaped asteroid of genderless, sexless, non-meritocratic, feelings-centric, pansy-assed Millennial culture streaks overhead to announce my impending doom. Maybe they’re right — but it doesn’t feel that way to me. The truth is that for most of my life I never really sympathized much with traditional Western culture or “caveman fragile masculinity” or any of that stuff.

When I was a young man, I saw myself as a progressive, non-traditional thinker. If there was a machine out there, so to speak, I wanted to rage against it. Obviously, I’m not exactly Charleston Heston, you know? I listen to disco music and order lime green cars and refer to Robert Bly every chance I get. Yet, here I am, taking a last stand against the overwhelming hordes of adult-kickball players and streaming-video addicts. If nobody else is going to stand up for the culture that lifted us from the caves of Altamira to the Manhattan Project, then I’m going to do it. You could argue that I’m in the position of the last Byzantine emperors: making a last-ditch stand to preserve a system to which I was not born.

With all of this in mind, I’d like to sit down with all of you and take a serious, considered look at the video below the jump. I’d like to argue that it represents several important trends in modern culture — trends of which many TTAC readers approve in theory but might be surprised to see taken to their logical extremes.

If I had to think of a single car that would be least likely to demonstrate “road-rage” behavior with a man behind the wheel, I’d have to pick the Tesla Model S, at least until the Model X becomes widely available.

If you’re planning a road trip this weekend, take a few pointers from this Russian dashcam video on how not to merge.

Everyone knows Russians are unable sustain injury on the roadways (or so it would seem), but this fact wasn’t known until videos started rolling in from the insurance fraud-prone country. Their problems are our gain, however, as these misadventures from the land of Putin and honey hold valuable road safety lessons.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale in the Crescent City of New Orleans, a city that has held the dubious title of “Most Dangerous City in America” on multiple occasions. 164 murders occurred in the city limits in 2015, the fourth highest murder rate per capita of any American city and the 32nd most of any city in the world, so it’s not unusual to hear of a shooting that occurred inside the Lower Garden District on Saturday night.

It’s a bit more unusual to hear that it might have been motivated by road rage, although we have certainly heard of that story before.

Yet, when a shooting involves one of the most beloved people in the history of the city, and when it begins to seem like there’s more to the story than just a traffic accident gone wrong, I begin to wonder how Will Smith ended up dead, slumped over the wheel of his vehicle, while his killer stood by calmly and waited to be arrested for murdering a local legend.

Last week, I asked the B&B if this Civic-ramming incident was malicious or merely idiotic. No such question could possibly be raised about what you’re about to see. This video has it all: the stereotypical “Florida Man” (or possibly “Georgia Man”) in full assault mode, some of the most hellaciously dangerous motorcycling you’ll ever see, and plenty of Michael-Bay-movie-in-real-life swerving into oncoming traffic.

The best part, however, is how a fellow behind the wheel of a motorcycle that is literally faster than a Ferrari 599 Fiorano can’t quite escape the murderous attentions of … a previous-generation Ford Fusion.

Somebody sign that guy up for NASCAR!

A handful of factors are fueling China’s current SUV boom, with road-rage protection at the top of the list.

At the big blue water tower, Interstate 90, known locally as the New York State Thruway, sweeps in from the east and turns sharply southward to skirt the city of Buffalo. The main interstate is joined there by I-290, one of the loop roads that comes in from the north, and although the roads are both heavily traveled, the intersection is not especially well thought out. The 290, three lanes wide, makes a clean split, the leftmost lane joining the eastbound lanes of the 90 while the rightmost lane heads up and over an overpass before joining the westbound lanes. The middle lane offers drivers the opportunity to turn either way but most people opt to take the west bound exit and, because the right most lane is eventually forced to merge into the left lane prior to actually joining the 90, most people tend to hang in the middle lane prior to the split and, during rush hour, traffic tends to slow. Naturally, wherever cars slow, dickheads want to use the open lane to pass and then merge at the last moment.

A tailgater is a bully par excellence and his weapon is the “I’m not touching you” game. You remember that game, don’t you? It’s the one where your older brother tries to hit you as hard as he can but always manages to miss by a fraction of an inch. When you flinch or complain to your mom the refrain is always the same: “I never even touched you.” Of course, to keep things interesting, sometimes he does actually hit you – if he always missed you’d have nothing to fear, right? On the road the game is almost exactly the same and nine times out of ten the bully never hits you. But once in a while – once in a great while – it’s “metal up your ass.”