Road Rage- Evasion and Escape

[NH Shooter]

Everyone today seems to have forgotten the 10 feet minimum for every 10 MPH following-distance rule. I've been rear-ended twice by distracted drivers on the Long Island Expressway, so ever since I prefer enough space for gradual stops instead of sudden ones. The only downside is it leaves more than enough room for others to cut into that space.

Happily I've been working remotely for the last four years and am able to avoid rush hour combat. But when a rager is near I do everything possible to stay out of their way and let them get past to continue their ass-hattery in front of me. A confrontation avoided is always a win.

[willie]

After I almost killed two people in the car I hit, I ceased rushing through yellow to beat red.

[VT1032]

You’ll probably enrage more people by stopping for a yellow light, besides the fact that nobody will expect you to do that.

I was somebody who never stopped for yellow lights, right up until late last year, when I was t-boned by some guy in an F-150 doing 60+ in a 45 zone who decided not to slow down and slightly misjudged the light cycle. I had my two-year-old in the car with me. Somehow neither of us was injured beyond some world-class bruises, but my car was totaled and it scared the shit out of me. I remember looking over right before the impact and the world slowed down and I just remember saying to myself "welp, this is gonna hurt" and it did... I'm definitely a lot more squeamish about intersections now. I practically triple-check, even on green lights.

Also, one of the two times I came close-ish to a defensive firearms use involved road rage. I was taking my wife and my first daughter, who was six months old at the time to the mall to see Santa on Christmas Eve. It was the middle of a snowstorm and the roads were absolute shit. All of a sudden this older Jeep Grand Cherokee being driven by the proverbial Bubba and Lurlene pulls up alongside me hooting and hollering and flipping me off and they started to get cute and try and drift me off the road. After about the third try of that, they pulled past, drove a bit farther and stopped blocking both lanes of traffic and Bubba started to get out with a pipe or a tire iron or something. I was driving a 4x4 SUV and wasn't going to play that game so I hopped the curb into the median and drove around them. After that, I thought I lost them and drove to the mall like an idiot, instead of calling the police or whatever. They followed me from a distance and blocked my car in while I was starting to get out. At that point, I figured shit was about to go down and had OC spray in my hand but they were on the phone with 911 so their behavior had improved and they did not get out of their car. Apparently, they were attempting to affect a citizen's arrest on me for snow hitting their car, which is a civil traffic infraction at best here. At that point, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head and I was like, oh yeah, 911 is a thing. I had been so wrapped up in solving the problem with the tools I had on hand I'd completely spaced on the fact that there are police to assist with situations like this. I called 911 in front of them and at that point, they took off, and I immediately drove to the nearest police department and filed a report. As far as I know, nothing happened to them since it turned into a "he said, she said" scenario but it was definitely eye-opening.

Big takeaways for me were that I got big-time sucked into the defensive driving and tactics piece of the situation and completely forgot about 911 and getting help. I also placed myself in an extremely vulnerable position by assuming that I had lost them, continuing on my merry way, and parking nose-first against a barrier that allowed me to get boxed in. Finally, when I went to write the police report, I remembered way less then I thought I would. I didn't even have their plate number. I'll admit I still haven't bought one, but a dashcam probably would have been very useful and might have led to further legal action against them.

[Wise_A]

Use the "Raylen Givens" approach - if the first person you meet in the morning is an A$$hole, you met an @$$hole. If EVERYONE you meet is an @$$hole, it's probably you who's the @$$hole... (Seriously, have to use that quote every chance I get, and NOT intending that you, Rex, or anyone else on PF is the @$$hole!)

Always loved that. And Justified is my current at-work "training video" on Hulu. Moving on!

If you can, drive to the nearest safe spot - PD, Fire Department, Hospital, etc - any place you're likely to find uniformed LE.

The one thing I would add is that just cuz it's a po-leece station don't mean it's got any po-leece inside of it if it's a rural or suburban department. Our field stations are not manned. All of the agencies we dispatch for don't man their main stations. There might be a guy or two in there at shift change, or if they're processing a ne'er-do-well that just-did, but you could drive on up and honk the horn and yell and those guys would never hear you. State police barracks ain't much better. Fuck, our main station typically doesn't have anyone capable of doing any work, just a captain or two and an Lt at most.

Similar advice goes for driving to the EMS base or the fire station. People do that all the time. Around here, never anyone there. Huge pain in the ass, we can get an ambulance out in the field faster.

Other advice. Numbers are drawn from my best recollection, which is likely fairly accurate, but all information is impartially anecdotal. Simply observations on the calls that come in.

*Dial 911 at your earliest opportunity. Be calm, know where you are, know what cardinal direction you're heading in. First-to-the-phone-wins isn't a thing, but if one party is calm and takes directions and the other is out swinging a sledgehammer around, well, the story writes itself. And we can direct you to where our units are coming from.

*I've fielded calls on numerous road-rage-type incidents. Like nearly all interpersonal crime in my relatively low-intensity conflict zone, the perpetrator was known to the victim around 95% of the time.

*On-the-road disturbances and such also account for around 95% of the cases where a person was assaulted by someone not known to them, once you exclude a particular street of dive bars. As such, in my jurisdiction, I would say that a law-abiding person stands the greatest chance of being targeted by a physical crime while driving. I'd further suggest that we're not unlike most suburban areas in that regard.

*The overwhelming majority of the time where the victim was assaulted, they rolled down their window to "talk" (how they describe it) to the subject, got out of their cars, etc. Mistakes were made.

*Weapons were present about half the time. I've taken on-the-road assault by golf club, wrench, rock, brick, tree branch, rebar, and sledgehammer. I've seen one serious hands-and-feet beating (one old fool instigated a confrontation with three shitbags that stomped him in broad daylight on a busy 4-lane road; first call received as they were leaving, no passersby rendered aid as he lay in the lane of traffic). In one instance, a shotgun was brandished at some bikers--I would call that a case of mutual combat.

*While many of the perpetrators of physical assaults were world-class, spot-em-a-mile-off shitheads, a significant proportion were also retirees, elderly, and soccer moms.

Other thing I would say: drive slow. Take it easy. I tracked my travel times to work--whether I drove quickly or intentionally slow, total travel time never varied by more than a minute on a 27-minute commute.

[Hambo]

Use the "Raylen Givens" approach - if the first person you meet in the morning is an A$$hole, you met an @$$hole. If EVERYONE you meet is an @$$hole, it's probably you who's the @$$hole... (Seriously, have to use that quote every chance I get, and NOT intending that you, Rex, or anyone else on PF is the @$$hole!)

I live in Florida, and everybody may not be an asshole, but they all drive like they are.

-Keep your ego in check and do not engage other drivers. Most videos of incidents show both drivers engaging in the monkey dance.
-If you let them go ahead of you, you preserve your options to avoid them.
-Always check the rear view when coming to a light, preparing to turn, slowing down. This has saved me from getting rear-ended numerous times.
-Leave yourself an exit at stoplights. Also don't pull up door to door with other cars in other lanes. Keep them slightly in front of you. Assholes that want to eye fuck you generally won't turn around to do it.

You win all the gunfights you avoid. You survive all the crashes you avoid.

[Donny B]

The same way you avoid any other dumb*ss crap...Use your brains...Semper Gumby...stay flexible.

[Skalkaho]

I get impatient with other drivers. I try to counter that tendency by reminding myself that I make my share of mistakes and need other drivers' patience as much as they need mine.

[runcible]

You’ll probably enrage more people by stopping for a yellow light, besides the fact that nobody will expect you to do that.

In my experience, that's a very regional thing - in example, running the yellows is very much the culture in my corner of the midwest. Curiously, it wasn't the norm in my preceding East Coast locale, though they had their own particular brand(s) of accepted bad behavior at the wheel.

I had a coworker with quite the temper problem whom regularly ran stale yellows and fresh reds and with speed, on the premise that it would never be a problem as long as he was the only one doing it. He wasn't wrong for the most part, but his two totaled cars and significant volume of debt related to the same attested to his twice encountering another form of himself up to the same thing. It tooks him years of work-subsidized public transportation to be able to afford a replacement-replacement clunker.

If me complying with the speed limit as appropriate or slowing for yellows as appropriate should lead to other drivers aggressively passing me, to include passing me and running stale yellows or fresh reds; then so much the better for me. That aggressiveness is further down the road and my own risk is mitigated.

[CDW4ME]

I drive like I don't want to be involved in a incident.