Serious Question: Why Does Losing a Few Seconds Lead to Road Rage?

Think about someone in front of you driving more slowly than you’d like in left lane of the freeway. Think about the car in front of you being slow to start at the newly green light. Think about Grandpa out for a leisurely drive when you need to get to work. Or even worse, think about one of those darn biking scofflaws taking the lane (in between running red lights, skimming from god-fearing taxpayers and endangering soccer moms’ children).

The first three may be technically illegal and/or dangerous. None of them are a material delay to your driving experience. All of them are frustrating. Why?

If you spend a half mile behind a bike, or two miles doing 55 instead of 65 or a few extra seconds at a light, your trip will range from exactly the same (if, for example, you’d have to stop at the next light anyway) to a few seconds longer. Why does it feel so important?

I think an answer to that question is critical to thinking about how to design our roads and, hopefully, make them safer for all users. If the answer is those lost seconds are precious and drivers can’t be asked to spare them, then maybe we can just keep expanding road capacity (to heck with induced demand!) and we’ll be a nation of happily speeding drivers.

In case the sarcasm isn’t obvious, I don’t think those seconds are that precious. And I don’t think anyone who stops to think about it actually believes they are.

Instead, I think what’s frustrating about these experiences isn’t that we’re not going slightly faster. It’s that we’re going slower than our context tells us is appropriate. Driving less than 30 miles per hour somewhere like here, for example, doesn’t inspire the same rage: