There’s no trophy waiting for you when you arrive at your destination. No cash prize, no leaderboard with your name on it. Did you beat the beige Camry to the next highway exit? Congratulations, I guess. Whether you’re traveling to work, the grocery store, Home Depot or Walmart, whether or not you arrive at 4:00 or 4:05 probably isn’t going to matter. At all.
And yet, as we all make our way down the highways and byways of these United States, drivers — at least those in the cities I’ve lived and worked in, like Detroit, Phoenix, Seattle and now Columbus — seem to treat America’s roadways like they make up a huge racing circuit.
People tailgate as if they were drafting on the last lap of a major NASCAR race. They swerve in and out of their lanes and into the narrowest of gaps as if they were Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen swapping places on an F1 circuit with the title on the line. And all too often, they crash.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, over the last 20 years speeding has been a contributing factor in roughly one-third of all motor vehicle accidents. The kind of driving mentioned at the outset of this article — tailgating, erratic lane changing, passing illegally — are factors in 56% of car crashes involving a fatality. Sometimes that fatality is the aggressor, sometimes it’s the driver who irritated the aggressor, and sadly other times it’s an innocent bystander.
A study by the AAA Foundation found that 9 out of 10 respondents agreed that aggressive drivers were either a “somewhat” or “very serious” threat to their personal safety. And yet many of those same drivers admitted on the same survey to driving aggressively.
I’m not going to type this while standing on a soapbox of my own. I freely admit that I have at times fallen into the group of drivers who these AAA or NHTSA studies would describe as “aggressive.” Have I sped over 15 miles per hour over the speed limit? Surely. Have I sped up to get through a yellow light? Yeah, that’s happened. Have I even sped up when I see someone behind me barreling ahead at what I’d call an unsafe speed before swerving into the right lane behind me to pass slower-moving traffic in the left lane? Guilty as charged.
Even as I admit some level of hypocrisy, I will also add that, in my fourth decade of life here on this spinning rock I call home, know that I’m actively settling down. I’ve never been a particularly aggressive driver, but these days I’ve grown quite comfortable hovering around the speed limit and letting other drivers go on their merry way. I prefer to wait for my turn to pass; when I see a yellow light, I gracefully get ready to slow to a stop. When I see someone tailgating me, I try to find another lane to move into.
Don’t get me wrong. I love fast cars, whether they are powered by combustion or electrons. I grew up on a steady diet of high-octane fuel and muscle cars. My family had a gaggle of vintage gasoline-powered beasts in our stable, from Pontiac GTOs and Trans Ams to lifted Jeeps. We had slow cars, too, though I’ll tell you it’s pretty fun to drive a slow car, like the vintage Volkswagen Beetle droptop I learned to drive in, at its comparably low limit.
I also ride motorcycles. Have for a long time, actually. My first off-roader was a KTM 125 that was tuned to within an inch of its tiny-piston life. I must have honed that cylinder and replaced the piston and rings at least three times each summer — I didn’t know there was a speed other than wide-open throttle.
Point being, I’m an enthusiast, and I have been basically since birth. I love to drive. I especially love to drive fast, in a straight line, over an undulating stretch of asphalt, even over a rutted and lumpy patch of dirt. If I can find a nice stretch of road that’s appropriate to enjoy in a fun car, I’ll travel hours to get there. There are some brilliant stretches of roadway in America seemingly designed for people who love to drive. Go out and enjoy them. Just please do so safety. And for goodness sake, don’t drive like an idiot on the highways that lead you to your destination.
I didn’t have access to high-end sport sedans and luxury coupes until I worked my way into the automotive industry via words on a screen, but now that I have, I’ve come to realize that the only real way to properly and safely push any car to its limit is on a race track.
And that’s the solution I’m going to offer to help dissuade aggressive driving on public roads. Take it to the track. Learn the limits of your car, whatever that car may be. I recognized that this suggestion is not a silver bullet that’s going to end the vehicular carnage that’s a real scourge to our roadways. It’s not likely to even put a serious dent in the high blood pressure millions of Americans feel behind the wheel on a daily basis. But it might help even a few of us to get some aggression out in the proper setting.
There’s probably a good race track pretty close to where you live. I’d recommend starting small. Consider a Regional Driver School. Try an autocross. Get out and use your car, whatever kind of car it may be. You may find you’ve got some natural talent. At the very least, hopefully you’ve found an awesome new hobby to enjoy.
If you’re lucky, maybe one day there will actually be a trophy waiting for you as you cross the finish line.
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Keyword: You're not racing, so stop driving like there's a trophy at your destination