Atlanta's clogged roads can breed road rage

Recently, the AJC featured stories about road rage deaths, including a tragic account of a rolling gun battle where a 6-year-old sitting with his two younger siblings was wounded.

It was yet another example of the carnage on Georgia’s roads as drivers often flip their lids over the small stuff. (Full disclosure: I’ve flipped a bird or two and have leaned on a horn.)

The stories of such “road rage” are nothing new — one pops up in Atlanta every month or two. The term itself appears to have come about in the 1980s after a rash of shootings on Los Angeles highways.

Its first use in the AJC that I can find occurred in 1996, although that sure wasn’t when drivers first started acting crazy.

In fact, five years earlier I covered a deadly gun battle that occurred on I-285. I interviewed a man named James VanAlstine a day after the driver of another car was shot to death. I met VanAlstine outside his home removing guns and putting them in his car to transport them elsewhere.

The incident started when VanAlstine’s car bumped into another, and the other guy said something. The battle continued on to the interstate.

The tragedy was the other guy’s doing, VanAlstine told me. His car had bullet holes in it, too.

Credit: John Spink

Credit: John Spink

“I dunno, those people in rush hour are crazy,” said VanAlstine. “They’re in a hurry and out there for themselves. There’s no give and take on the highways.”

Three months later, he was convicted of murder on charges stemming from the incident.

I bring this up to say this is nothing new. But the roadway shoot-em-ups are relatively rare, despite their omnipresence in the media.

We are dangerous without our guns. Most of the violence on the roads is not from firearms but old-fashioned bad driving.

As car and road designs continue to improve (traffic death rates are half what they were in the early 1970s), drivers still operate with their reptilian car brains.

Driving is a complex task involving mortals with varying skills and attention spans maneuvering tons of metal at astonishing (as nature goes) speeds. For instance, 45 mph is 66 feet per second. Man’s evolution through the millennia hasn’t caught up with the past 100-some years of transport technology.

And considering you’re surrounded by many, many humans doing the same thing, all making their own varying split-second decisions at high speeds, it’s a wonder crash rates aren’t worse.

I’d chalk up most of the mayhem to four categories: Distraction, selfishness, aggression and cluelessness. You wonder how some people ever convinced the DMV to give them a license.

The driving organization AAA has projected some 62 million Americans will be traveling at least 50 miles from home this Independence Day weekend. And havoc is sure to follow because bad driving is as American as fireworks and hot dogs.

Credit: Miguel Martinez

We’re a freedom and independence loving lot and nothing screams “Freedom!!!” like opening it up on the freeway.

Problem is, those freeways are now rarely free of traffic, so those who insist on demonstrating their independence must swerve by, speed past and tailgate the rest of us laggards to get where they are going.

Naturally, I am placing myself in the sensible drivers’ category because, well, just about everyone else does, too.

In 2022, the insurance company Nationwide released a poll that found 85% of drivers rate their driving as excellent or very good. Fittingly, just 29% think others measure up to their skills.

It’s like the old George Carlin line: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot. And anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

No truer observation was ever made.

That same 2022 Nationwide poll found that 80% of people think drivers are more aggressive and drive faster since COVID.

There is something to that. Some drivers enjoyed the suddenly open asphalt during the start of the pandemic and continued their dangerous ways after the highways filled back up.

You know who they are, the yahoos zipping across three lanes at 20 mph faster than everyone else, just so they can tailgate a couple of feet behind someone.

In Georgia, there were less than 1,500 deaths in 2019, the year before COVID. In 2022, almost 2,000 people died on the roads, a 33% increase.

Credit: AJC File Photo

The death toll has dropped somewhat, but in 2013 there were 1,186 traffic deaths in Georgia. So we clearly have a problem.

(A little Public Service Announcement here: The GDOT says that 62% of those killed in 2022 were either not wearing a seat belt or investigators could not determine if they were. It is stunning to think people still do not buckle up.)

Here’s a passage from a Georgia appeals court decision reminding us nothing is new under the sun. It’s from 1907: “It is insisted in the argument that automobiles are to be classed with ferocious animals, and that the law relating to the duty of the owners of such animals is to be applied. It is not the ferocity of the automobile that is to be feared, but the ferocity of those who drive them.”

Remember, folks, we’re not ferocious animals.

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