Bike Rage
illustration by chris bentzen
I could see their faces through the passenger window. He: leaning over the Pathfinder’s steering wheel, barking into a cell phone. She: peering at me through the glass with the startled look of someone surprised by a wild animal. As I punched the car door, I could see my own reflection, too: face pinched and flushed beneath my helmet, lips mouthing:
“You almost killed me! You almost killed me!”
If you are a bike commuter, you know there is nothing unique about this moment. It began with a driver’s careless migration into the curb lane and my realization that I was about to be squeezed off the road yet again, or sideswiped if cell phone guy decided to turn right. A yell didn’t get his attention. The door punch did. We were stuck with each other at the light. The window opened a crack. Obscenities were exchanged. I felt the heat of indignation in my veins. At some point I heard myself yell: “Fat boy!”
And then we were off. I caught the green first, made it half a block before he crossed the line. I burned right on a one-way street. They followed, window down.
“My boyfriend’s gonna kill you!” she screamed.
“Try and catch me,” I yelled, doubling back towards safety. “Fat ass!”
Fat boy? Fat ass? Where the hell did those lines came from? I don’t normally yell at strangers, let alone comment on the shape of their bodies. I’m not a fighter, but in that moment I was transformed by a primal rush of fear and anger. I was “bike rage” incarnate.
You’ve been there, too; admit it. Bike rage is a common occurrence, and quite predictable, according to road rage guru Leon James. The University of Hawaii professor of psychology has spent decades examining how commuting on city roads is so efficient at producing tension, anxiety, and anger – in drivers as well as cyclists. James’ theories should be enough to turn the most self-righteous door-smackers among us into pavement pacifists, for our own good.
For starters, the driving experience primes car drivers for meltdowns.
They are conditioned by popular culture to see cars as symbols of freedom, yet city driving is a slow-motion trap that subjects drivers to constant restrictions on their movement. Drivers are thwarted from enjoying the promise of motion by traffic lights, by congestion – and yes, by cyclists – and they suffer the natural but impossible desire to escape and move forward. All this while being strapped to their seats! That’s where the frustration begins. But drivers carry with them a load of cultural baggage that gets them even more cranked.
“The symbolic portrayal of the car has tied it to individual freedom and self-esteem, promoting a mental attitude of defensiveness and territoriality,” James wrote in his seminal essay, “Why Driving Is Stressful.” The car is an extension of self, he goes on to explain, so drivers take threats to the integrity of their vehicles personally. This renders the commute exhausting since the threat of accidents, scratches, or bumps is constant. Drivers may be encased in reinforced metal, but they never lose that sense of danger.
This potent cocktail of physiological stress and negative emotions – from fear and helplessness to resentment – needs only the trigger of confrontation to be transformed into outright rage.
Road rage is nothing new. But it seems rage between cyclists and drivers is increasingly common. Reports pepper nightly newscasts across the continent. One shocking case erupted in Portland last summer. After a cyclist allegedly kicked the side of his car, a 46-year-old driver then pursued him around a corner and ran him down. The cyclist bounced onto the hood and smashed into the windshield. The driver wasn’t finished. He struck two cars and then another cyclist before stopping. He later told police that he was frustrated that the cyclist wasn’t “sharing the road.”
Bike rage can be just as ugly: last November, after being cut off by a driver just after morning rush hour in Toronto, a cyclist caught up to the car, reached inside the window, and stabbed the driver in the face and neck with a screwdriver.
These scenes may be horrific but they feel strangely familiar. James insists that it is common for drivers to imagine scenes of violence and retribution during the course of their commutes. It makes sense for the same to be true of cyclists, whose sense of vulnerability goes beyond the threat of scratched paint. We risk life and limb at every encounter. Who can blame us for harbouring revenge fantasies?
Our speed and manoeuvrability enables us to lash out and retreat – think of the classic U-lock bash-and-run. Some cyclists consider such attacks acts of driver education. That’s how I explained it in an email to James, anyway. He warned me to take a chill pill.
He pointed out that road confrontations usually don’t produce anything but heightened anger – coupled with escalating retribution – in both parties. I suppose my Pathfinder showdown proved as much. I spent the morning quivering with adrenaline, unable to get work done, imagining what could have been.
This kind of road rage is a symptom of the corrosive effect that modern commuting has on urban culture. Aggressive streets are not just dangerous, they change the way we feel and the way we treat each other, even when we’re not commuting.
The emerging science of happiness may offer solutions to the malaise of confrontational commuting. Studies suggest that feelings of safety, equity, and trust are key ingredients of everyday well-being. Trust is the most powerful of them all, according to John Helliwell, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and expert on the science of happiness. Every time we have a positive encounter with a stranger, it builds that sense of trust – not just in that person, but in other people we happen to meet as well. Feelings of trust make us more likely to be courteous and kind to strangers, more likely to give people the benefit of the doubt. (Trust even makes us more likely to volunteer and to vote; it actually makes us better citizens.) This trust alchemy happens in eye contact between cyclists, nods between merging drivers, or just regular folks offering passing smiles on sidewalks.
The problem is that city planners have mixed bikes and cars together in ways that offer little certainty about how each should operate, and lots of chances for conflict. Cyclists feel threatened in traffic, just like drivers. Many of us feel hard done by and under attack. I sure do. The average arterial road is an engine of conflict.
But what if this happiness theory was applied to our streets? The experiment has already been conducted in Bogota, Colombia. When he was first elected in 1998, former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa devised a plan to make the streets of this famously violent city feel safer and fairer. A key part of the plan was building a vast network of protected bike lanes so cyclists could travel without feeling threatened by cars. On my visit to Bogota last year, citizens told me that these measures were part of the reason the city feels less confrontational and more convivial. Drivers are better off, too: the rate of traffic accidents plummeted.
Some cyclists – myself included – bemoan the fact that so many fools, asses, and daydreamers are operating cars in North American cities. We personalize the problem. James, however, reminded me to blame the road, not the drivers. On another day, that jerk driver is a timid cyclist, and vice-versa. It’s the experience of driving that turned my Pathfinder foe into a monster – and yes, it was the experience of cycling surrounded by thousands of pounds of metal that did the same to me.
What drivers need, James says, is a lifelong program of education that would start in grade one; educating kids about human rights and community spirit. And what about us cyclists? We need to keep in mind that drivers are vulnerable people who happen to have a deadly weapon at their disposal. Then we need to change the streets. “Use political methods to gain what you want,” he counselled.
James may be an incurable driver, but I know he’s right. If I want real change, I’ve got to ease up on the outrage and channel my frustration into urban design activism. Call the city’s traffic department, paint a bike lane, write a letter, vote, keep riding, breathe, feel the sheer joy of movement in every commute. And let that joy flow out through an open smile.
If you’re out there, Pathfinder guy, I really don’t think you are fat. I feel your pain. And I’m sorry.
To read more of Dr. Leon James’ ideas, visit www.drdriving.org
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