A road rage incident must be triggered.  It is not an unprovoked attack by an evil person on an innocent.  It is a self-proclaimed hero’s sincere effort to restore balance and harmony to the world through instructive punishment.  The driver who sees himself as the road rage victim is actually the cause.  Anyone who finds that he is routinely attacked for no apparent reason is oblivious of his own behavior.

Both road rage and the obliviousness have the same underlying causes.  Indeed, virtually all driver behavior problems share the same underlying causes: 1) lack of a clear and widely accepted paradigm for good driving, 2) defensive driving, 3) driver education.

In surveys, 80% to 85% of drivers rate themselves above average.  However, if asked what comprises good driving, they would not agree.  The aggregate of their criteria and definitions would show abundant variety and considerable contradiction.  So much for a paradigm.

Now, take those millions of drivers with irreconcilable opinions on all aspects of driving and sanction their prejudices.  Tell them that everybody who doesn’t drive as they do is wrong – dangerous.  Tell them to protect themselves from everybody else out there on the road.  In short, tell them to Drive Defensively!  Start them out with no paradigm, then give them every reason to believe that the entire road safety establishment endorses their unique way of driving as the one and only right way and you provide no reason for either honest self-assessment or striving to improve.  Defensive driving’s real message is, “I’m okay; you’re an idiot.”

Driver education should save the situation.  It should provide the paradigm, the encouragement, the training.  It doesn’t.  It never has.  For decades, study after study has shown traditional high school driver education to be ineffective – worthless.  That is because driver ed. teaches pseudo-skills, not roadcraft, and preaches using mature judgment without providing the information necessary to do so.  Driver education trivializes driving and disrespects its students.  It has refined, codified, and finally institutionalized ignorance about learning, teaching and driving.

Returning now to the much smaller issue of road rage, the stage is set for each event by the root causes of driver misbehavior just described.  The catalyst is any perceived assault on one’s control.  Control is the central issue in human life.  At least the illusion of control is, and driving literally is controlling.  A road rage incident happens like this: A driver, who of course knows he is right, believes he is blocked, or crowded, or inconvenienced, or forced to yield by the incompetence of one of the idiots (anybody else).  He is stripped of control and reacts as biology demands he must. He does something intended to restore his feeling of being in control.

Finally, aggressive driving is NOT road rage.  It is an entirely separate issue, as are severe mental and emotional pathologies manifested in driving behavior.