Rage Against The Machine

With road rage incidents leading nightly news bulletins, our streets and highways have become riven with bile, vitriol and, increasingly, violence. What’s driving motorists to madness? One man with a history of losing his cool behind the wheel takes a look in the rearview mirror to try to identify the problem’s root causes and determine what you can do the next time someone grinds your gears

- Stephen Corby

If I were the police, I’d probably lock me up. Or worse still, take my licence away – either for past crimes or for fear of what I might do next.

In the real world, without a tonne of shiny steel and glass around me, I’m not a violent man. Indeed I shun physical confrontations so assiduously you’d think I had a beautiful face to look after. But on the road, I rage. And I really wish I could stop.

You’ve probably felt it yourself – research by the Monash University Accident Research Centre found that 86 per cent of Australians admit to being aggressive when driving: that instantaneous, bile-rising, white-hot anger that seems to come from nowhere, like a lit firecracker falling from the sky. Sometimes it sets off a spray of abusive language so foul that I feel truly awful when I calm down . . . and remember my children are in the back.

On good days, I’ll leave the window up as I scream at the other motorist. But on the bad days I’ve done stupid, unforgivable and criminal things, acts which truly seem to bear no relation to the person I, my family or my friends think I am.

I have chased other motorists, cut them off, brake-tested them, almost run someone off the road. And I have leapt from my car at the lights and spat threats and spleen through the window of an older driver, who responded by taunting me. So I snatched his wallet off the passenger seat.

What makes it even more unforgivable is that I’ve been on the other end of road rage.

Some years ago, an English friend and I were chased through the streets of Barcelona by a gang of hoodlums threatening to beat us into something pulpy after I’d suggested, using sign language, that the driver of their car was someone fond of using a cocktail shaker with great enthusiasm.