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Road Rage or Agressive Driving - We don't need it

This is sad. This is hard to write about. Here is a quote from BayNews9 on a Road Rage crackdown.

Road rage is in the spotlight this week after an incident that led to the death of a man on the Courtney Campbell Causeway.

Vincent Tucker, 33, died Tuesday morning after a road rage incident. A black SUV that was behind his car on the causeway began honking his horn when Tucker didn't move over. The suspect's vehicle passed Tucker on the right, then cut Tucker off.

Tucker's car flipped over and he was ejected. Tucker was pronounced dead at Tampa General Hospital.

Hearing about aggressive driving is not new. Driver dot com has several articles related to Road Rage. AAA has a Foundation for Traffic Safety site. There are even websites dedicated to road rage.

Trouble is, there are no easy answers. You can try steer clear tips or take a driving style test but these only go so far. When you're on the road you have no idea when something may happen that's beyond your control.

It's odd that I learned important things about driving after I slowed down. At first I only wanted to test the 60 mph theory. My gas mileage went from 28 mpg to 34 mpg but that didn't matter much. What struck me the most was the fact that I noticed I was being passed by the same cars more than once! This meant I was passing faster drivers by knowing how to handle heavy traffic. Slowing down didn't change my arrival time very much either. A 30 mile one-way trip where all but 6 miles are on the highway and I was passing faster drivers (at times or during certain volume conditions) and still arriving within minutes of my old times (which used to be 9 or more miles an hour over the speed limit). No worries about tickets or changing lanes any more. Further proof: After leaving a meeting at a soon-to-be-new office location (this actually happened twice) behind a co-worker, I put the cruise control on at 60 and watched them pull away from me (highway speed limit was 65). When I arrived at the (old) office, I turned the car off in time to see the (previous) lead car pull in the parking lot behind me. Turns out my knowing the traffic conditions and which lanes to drive in for the off-highway sections more than make up for my slower speed on the highway.

And yet? For all my thinking, paying attention and research I still have no idea how to prevent aggressive driving or road rage. Or save lives.

Do you?

tag: Driving

posted by Kev @ 4/29/2005 01:18:00 AM