Emad Barsoum writes: The Road Rage

I tried, many times, to accept how people’s behavior on roads has drastically changed, and how we are witnessing a new era of negative development with such behavior. When we point at the conduct of the road it involves pedestrians, drivers, or passengers in public transports. 

Living in our great province with its wonderful cosmopolitan cities, we take it for granted that our governments possess and implement the most effective traffic and roads management systems, as well as public transport, and primarily, we imagine, mistakenly, that we are the most law-abiding citizens! But living in absolute confidence entails only reversion of the quality of life.

Desolately, what we have heard of or experienced lately deepens and intensifies the conviction that we are suffering from a massive deterioration in the behavior and respect towards roads and traffic regulations, principles, and ethics.

Ranging from drivers who litter their drinks on the road while driving or different forms of garbage to swearing and threatening the use violence towards others or even the attempt to push other drivers off the road which could represent major or life threats injuries, actions that have been a common practice on today’s roads. 

Such different forms of road rage or misconduct and repetitive violation of all rules have revealed a deep crack in the coherence of our society and even our fallacy of inclusion and diversity.

For some drivers, once they get into a road dispute, the first aggressive reaction is always involving a racial or discriminative comment and abuse, and that is a firsthand experience. Another observed incidence, several large transport truck drivers are recently showing aggressive attitude towards drivers of passenger or small commercial vehicles, to the extent of scaring those smaller vehicles, this continuous behavior is frequently noticed nowadays, however, a few years ago we would rarely realize it on the roads. Dump trucks, even worse, represent a clear and present danger, they show no respect to the rules of the road nor any discipline, exposing many lives to danger, and they know very well that they will get away with it, simply because there is no company name or number written on the trucks, which would exist on major transport companies’ trucks. Similarly, their plates are usually smudged, so no one can identify them if they are involved in an accident.

What happened to our ideal society, the place we thought is free from many social flaws that could be noticed in different corners around the globe?

What could be detected as major causes for traffic and road chaos and rage is related, first, to the absence of discipline enforced by the authorities, the authority that any society has granted it the proxy to act on its behalf to ensure public safety and social stability. We realize the absence of police patrols on major or crowded highways, rather they are present at less busy roads just to enforce speed limits, leaving the high-volume roads to the law of the jungle, the fittest dominates the road. 

Even more, most incidents currently are directly related to Lax Security, which was never the situation several years ago. We could realize the high presence of police in our communities in the past, now, we hardly feel it in our cities.

Is it the lack of resources? Increase in population that is not met by increasing the security forces? Or it is a neglected topic on the politicians’ agenda as an attempt to paint our society as free from faults while supporting their political claims that we are the ideal diverse society, hiding our heads in the sand.