Originally Posted by gizmocat
Anyone can drive here, even the mentally incompetent. Don't forget that one in ten people you meet are either on medication, or should be. Also that the average I.Q. is one hundred, which means that fifty per cent are below that.
To be picky, that would be necessarily true only if the
median I.Q. were 100. I believe you are correct that the
average (mean) I.Q. is 100. Anyway, I agree with your general point.
As to the OP, I agree with many of the posters that road rage is largely a fact independent of whether there are any cyclists on the road. I hope Robert Hurst doesn't mind me quoting from his book,
The Art of Urban Cycling, which I've been reading recently and which includes these two salient paragraphs on road rage:
We just might feel the harmful sociological effects of automobile enclosure every time we go for a ride, or drive. The most noticeable effect is increased road rage, and the general ramping up of b!tchiness among encased drivers, who, free from the encumbrance of face-to-face contact, decide to just speed past flipping the bird or yelling a few choice words at whoever fills them with hate at the moment, then bolt away. They figure they're never going to see that person again. Traffic is a bit like the Internet in that regard. Out on the sidewalk, where getting walloped violently is a more pressing possibility, suddenly all the road ragers are quite polite to each other.
Cyclists tend to take these hit-and-run road-rage encounters rather personally, which is unfortunate. Usually such an encounter is a simple example of traffic being traffic. Enclosure creates anonymity, which breeds tantrums. If we're going to be out in it, we should not get all bent out of shape about the unshakable realities of traffic any more than we should get down on the street and bang our heads against the pavement. Doing the latter might be a little more satisfying, actually. (34-35)