[spandexwarrior]

I found this website, with much information about driving psychology, mainly road rage. It has this section which goes into depth about road rage called," Aggressive Driving is Emotionally Impaired Driving (http://www.drdriving.org/courses/conference_paper.htm)" I the funny thing is that google directed me to the part of the site which has excerpts from an odd book (http://www.drdriving.org/articles/christ.htm) advising Christians on how to drive- actually encouraging them to be nice, patient, etc. Maybe we should be passing this book out at churches or to rude drivers. This Dr. Driver thing made me think, though. What if the drivers who do kill or maim cyclists in road rage were ordered mandatory psychological counselling aimed at getting to the root of their "issues." Much in the way criminals have to take anger management classes. Yeah, this is a big what if. Road rage is just too prevalent these days.

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[Roody]

When I was a grad student in clinical psych, I had to do an assessment and report for the Sec. of State on the guy with "the eighth worst driving record in Michigan." One thing I remember is that he had some mild learning disabilities and some perceptual difficulties. He also showed little understanding for the possible consequences of his bad driving, since he had miraculously never injured anybody. But he didn't have any anger issues whatsoever! I think that maybe road rage has been blown out of proportion a bit. Some of the worst drivers are incompetent, not homicidal. However they do have that antisocial trait of not understanding (or not caring) how their actions affect others. If they didn't, they would voluntarily quit driving after a few close calls.

The one good thing I learned is that the Sec. of State's people were going to a lot of trouble to get this guy off the road. They say driving is a privelege, not a right, but it's damn hard to take that privilege away from somebody before they actually hurt somebody.

[mandovoodoo]

I've not seen a common denomenator in the idiots I've actually talked to face to face.

Old man whose dog I maced off my foot. Livid, out of control, no explanation.

Guy who calmly tried to run me off the Blue Ridge Parkway - calm, "bikes shouldn't ride side by side" - he ended up punching me anyway, but later had "car trouble"

"I didn't see you"

Several "I'm an ******* with a big car."

One attack with an object.

While there may be some emotional content with these folks, their intentional interference didn't seem to primarily spring from such troubles. Perhaps disconnected from reality is more like it, at least a reality that has people on bikes as real people with real rights.

[cedo]

he ended up punching me anyway, but later had "car trouble".

Surely you are leaving out some of the juicy details -- enquiring minds want to know.

[closetbiker]

I have always thought a good amount of the "difficult" drivers, were "difficult" people that fines or licence removal would do little to control and who have problems in other areas of their life as well.

The question seems to be, how many of these are like this, and what pecentage are they of traffic problems, and how many traffic problems are the result of drivers that just make an occasional mistake?

I think if an individual makes a mistake once in a blue moon, that's tolerable (we are, after all, human), but the problem people are the difficult challenge that has to be overcome to make road use safer.