Some people are just permanently about to lose it.

• seeing your car as an extension of yourself – it’s not “your car hit my car”, it’s “you hit me!”
• disassociation – not seeing the other drivers as humans, just seeing their cars
• willingness to conflate minor inconveniences with being the victim, being oppressed

Have a read of barrier aggression in dogs?

TLDR: Dogs use body language. smell etc to gauge wether another dog is friend or foe. When a barrier (like a fence etc) stops this assessment, they go straight to aggression as a defence/protection measure.

My guess is it a similar thing in humans.

We are stripped of our usual communication and threat assessment of the other person we would have in a normal encounter. We can’t see their face, their body language etc etc. So if someone is prone to anxiety and/or aggression (two sides of the same coin), they jump straight to “That driver is a cunt who did that on purpose and to spite me”.

Lots of good suggestions here, including the difficulty in communicating inherent to being in a car.

I think another important factor is that driving itself is stressful. Surveys of commuters consistently show that people who walk or cycle have the highest satisfaction with their commute, while motorists ranks somewhere from the middle to the bottom (i.e., either ahead of or behind people who use public transport), depending on the study.

When you put people in a stressful situation where it’s difficult to communicate, inevitably some people lose their temper.

i mean a big part of it is just the fact that cars are so inherently bad as a form of transport that 5 of them meeting at an intersection results in people having to stop and wait, which obviously results in frustration because you’re constantly blocked with no way of even turning around.

compare this to a bike where you’re never really blocked unless you’re in a pedestrian area, and even then you can just turn around and leave and pick a different route.

Because I can’t see through these god damn LED headlights this F150/Silverado is using to blind the fuck out of my as it barrels down the road to hang out on my ass in the right lane because someone in the left lane is going to slow.

This is an interesting discussion. I’ve had a few loonies rage at me. How do you handle when drivers follow you way too close, like if you have to brake they might rear-end your car? I’ve had this happen a few times and it’s never because I’m driving under the limit, I usually speed moderately at 20% over. My solution has been to ease my foot off the accelerator to slowly slow down to give them a hint. Some catch on and back off, others get aggressive.

Edit: I should note that speeding up isn’t always possible because in some cases I’m behind someone else at a safe distance.

I try to keep my zen while driving, and mostly I just suffer from road depression instead of rage. I get road depression because driving forces you to interact with many people, and you begin to realize the high fraction of people with serious mental impairment.

I try to put myself in their shoes, but the most charitable explanations for some driving behaviors are i) distraction - usually from cell phones - and ii) not thinking about the consequences of a behavior on others.

One of my pet peeves is drivers who perpetually drive on the right edge (for right side driving countries) of the lane / in the bike lane. When someone in front of them turns right to leave the road, they do not know how to go around them because the left side of the lane is a no-go zone. That means the whole lane has to stop. When they stop at a red light, no cars can pass them on the right to make a legal turn. They might acknowledge this by pulling forward more, as if that helps. Then when they get to the next intersection, the same thing happens again! Like, HAVE YOU NEVER TURNED RIGHT ON A RED YOURSELF? DO YOU NOT KNOW YOU SHOULD GET AS FAR LEFT AS POSSIBLE IN THE RIGHT LANE WHEN COMING TO A RED LIGHT? HOW DO YOU FUNCTION IN THE WORLD WHILE SO BLISSFULLY UNAWARE?

Oops. Lost my zen.