This post is further to this braindump.
I've noticed a correlation between driving and yelly/angry behaviour.
A friend of mine once worked for the City of Toronto in a number of different offices, and she said that by far the most anger she ever faced was in the parking office. People get way more disproportionately angry about parking tickets or not being allowed to park where they want or not being able to find a parking spot than anything else. That is consistent with my own observations of life in general.
For the purposes of constructing a sensible sentence, I'm going to deem the set of all the people who have ever been the driver of a car in which I was a passenger "my drivers". I'd say a good 80% of the anger I have witnessed from my drivers has occurred while they were driving, even though the vast majority of the time I have spent with these people has been outside of the car.
My yelly fast-food customers were nearly all drivers, and actually most of the yelly behaviour came through the drive-thru.
Rob Ford's angry demographic skews towards drivers. And again, I'm supporting and they're opposing policies that would make driving less necessary.
Is driving scary? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving stressful? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving disempowering? No. Driving increases empowerment and agency and resilience.
So why does it correlate with an increase in anger and yelling?
13 comments:
I have to think about this.
I love driving and don't find it at all stressful - although I don't commute in traffic on a daily basis, which would be stressful.
On the other hand, I found using only public transit quite stressful. In NYC, transit is overcrowded, inadequate (not frequent enough), and full of maddening annoyances. I found it much, much stressful, and much more prone to cause me to lose my temper than driving.
I think there might be other factors causing both driving and yelling, as opposed to driving and yelling having a causal relationship. (I understand you aren't saying it is a causal relationship.)
Those are just first thoughts. I want to think about it more.
More thoughts:
- Driving makes you beholden to factors that are unpredictable and entirely outside your control (gas prices, traffic jams, etc.)
- On public transit, you can switch off your brain/focus/concentration - zone out or chat or sleep or read or game. While driving, you have to think and focus and concentrate the whole time. In my experience, that's work and it's draining. I'm not sure if skilled/experienced drivers still find it draining or hard work.
- On public transit, you can switch off your brain/focus/concentration - zone out or chat or sleep or read or game. While driving, you have to think and focus and concentrate the whole time.
When public transit is humane and reliable, that is true. When it's overheated, overcrowded, causes you to wait huge amounts of time, forces you to be squashed against strangers, etc, it is not.
To me, routine driving requires very little concentration or focus. The only time I find it tiring is doing it for many hours at a stretch.
Re factors outside my control, that's unfortunately how I feel about transit. When I take the GO + TTC to school, I have to schedule my whole day around the GO schedule, it adds hours onto my day. Another example, I drive to work with my partner, we leave 40 minutes door to door. On the way home, I take the GO, it takes me an hour and 15 minutes, plus the bus is packed with people talking loudly on their cell phones, an extreme irritant to me.
Then there are errands and shopping. A lifetime of doing all my shopping on foot, carrying packages. I did it, but eventually I came to hate it.
In principle I love public transit. But giving it up for driving has been a great relief to me since leaving NYC.
More thoughts, nonlinear and unrelated to each other:
1. I don't find public transit stressful at all, because every time my commute has changed, it's changed for the better. (It's going to change for the worse in a couple of years - I'll let you know how I feel then.)
Maybe for the anger in general(i.e. not just limited to the driving thing), there's something that's changing for the worse? And I'm not seeing it?
2. For driving specifically, I wonder if the speed is a factor in the stressfulness (insofar as it is stressful.) No more than 4 generations ago, the kind of attention and anticipation and reaction needed to drive 50 km/h in mixed traffic were not necessary in any area of life. There's no way our brains can be properly wired for this.
3. Then there are errands and shopping. A lifetime of doing all my shopping on foot, carrying packages. I did it, but eventually I came to hate it.
This made me realize that carrying packages on foot isn't even on the radar. I do it all the time, of course, but I don't even think about it. It's like how if I want coffee, I have to go to the kitchen, make it, and carry it to my desk. So what? That's how the world works.
Maybe the source of the yelling/anger is some stressor/trigger that people don't even notice because it's so ingrained in life it isn't on the radar.
No more than 4 generations ago, the kind of attention and anticipation and reaction needed to drive 50 km/h in mixed traffic were not necessary in any area of life. There's no way our brains can be properly wired for this.
I don't agree. Human brains are very malleable. Video games - computer use in general - hi-tech surgery - human brains adapt to all kinds of activities that weren't available even one generation ago, or even when the human in question was born.
This made me realize that carrying packages on foot isn't even on the radar. I do it all the time, of course, but I don't even think about it.
I didn't think about it for years and years - even decades. I don't know if it was age, or my health, or the fact that I lived in a very un-hip neighbourhood but often wanted to shop in a more upscale one (talk about first-world problems), but it started to wear on me.
Maybe the source of the yelling/anger is some stressor/trigger that people don't even notice because it's so ingrained in life it isn't on the radar.
I also wonder if the car correlation is skewed because most people in North America drive. There are a few places where not driving is the norm - you live in one and I used to live in another - but in most places driving is the norm. So the anger and the driving may have no real relationship at all.
But there's still the fact that the vast majority of anger I've seen from my drivers has been while they were behind the wheel. And this includes my parents, whom I lived with 24/7 for 20 years, and several other people with whom I'm on intimate enough terms that they wouldn't be hiding any anger they felt.
Or maybe it's an introvert/extrovert thing.
I guess my experience re cars and yelling is so different that it just doesn't compute with yours at all. I've never experienced this driving anger and I don't think I've ever seen it. If I have seen it, it didn't make an impression on me.
Weird how those things work. From where I'm sitting, it's like you just said "People yelling at the TV while watching sports? I've never heard of such a thing! But I do find comedy aggravating on occasion."
As soon as we moved here in late 2005, I noticed right away that drivers in Canada can be extremely aggressive at freeway entrance and exit ramps or if you want to change lanes. I won't say I was "shocked", but it was WAY MORE aggressive than anything I dealt with in NYC or anywhere else in the US. (It goes against the stereotype of the Canadian who will avoid face-to-face confrontation at all costs. But maybe inside his car, it is different.)
I have had other drivers speed up to not allow me onto the Gardiner. Cars also speed up to not allow me to change lanes when it is obvious I need to get the fuck off the highway and thus would not be a slow poke in front of them (is that what they are worried about?).
When I come home from work, I get on the Gardiner downtown and I often have cars speed up to pass me, then cut directly in front of me to exit at the exit ramp just ahead. It is super dangerous. Why would they not slow down, come in behind me, and go down the ramp? They have to slow down anyway, since you cannot do 110 all the way down an exit ramp.
At Canadian Tire one day about a year ago, a guy thought I took his parking spot (he was wrong) but he was too scared to actually talk to me directly. So he left me a note.
Weird how those things work.
It really is. I've seen this rude driving that redsock describes but no yelling. I must drive in my own little driving-happiness bubble.
When I first did classroom driver's ed at the age of 16, they told us that the way you merge onto a highway is you speed up and try to get in between the other cars, and the other cars should move over or otherwise make room to let you in.
That sounded absolutely batshit looney to me. We're dependent entirely on the other cars to let us in? And they can't come up with a better way to do it? And the entire safety of the entire highway system is predicated on the assumption that other cars will just...let us in? I couldn't imagine how anyone could possibly think that would work.
And yes, the most-travelled highway of my life up to that point was the QEW towards or into Toronto.
I have had a few highway driving lessons, and I've successfully merged about half a dozen times. (100% success rate, low total number of attempts). And it still doesn't make sense to me that it works.
In LA, everyone drives really really fast and really really close together - bumper to bumper 90 MPH (like 145 km/hr). And there are tons of exits that require multiple lane-switching - jug-handles, clover leafs - highways merging all over the place.
People drive fast and aggressively, but for the most part, everyone lets everyone else change lanes as needed, and will slow down a bit to let anyone in. The signage is terrible, and it's assumed that people will see exits late and have to quickly change lanes to compensate - and everyone lets you do it.
In the GTA the highways are relatively straightforward and there's good signage. But most drivers don't want to let you change lanes, seemingly out of spite.
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