Interstate anger
Page 2

...faceless SUVs and sedans. “The reason that people commit road rage is that they believe they’re anonymous in their vehicles,” said Ed Andrews, president of DriveCam, a company that sells a car-mounted camera invented by a road-rage victim. If Oedipus had known that his long-lost father was in the other chariot, for example, would he have slaughtered him? “When you see somebody in another car, you don’t see them as another person, you see them as a means to an end,” said Scott Geller, a psychology professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. “It is very impersonal. We see other vehicles as just vehicles.”

Geller aims to bring civility and person-to-person communication back to the roads. He received a patent in 2000 for a device called The Polite Lite that would allow drivers to communicate with other drivers without using their third digit. A driver would install a green light above his car’s brake light. One blink of the light would mean “Please,” two blinks would mean, “Thank you,” and three would be, “I am sorry.” The technique works just as well with hazard lights. Geller conducted a pilot study with the Polite Lite in Christiansburg, Va. He found that using the code decreased drivers’ negative emotions. “It’s almost like giving them a sense of control,” Geller said. “When we say, ‘Thank you,’ we feel better. The behavior of communicating makes people less aggressive.”

Sometimes, road rage is a sign that drivers demand too much control, so one way to avert this may be to wrest power. Luxury carmakers Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz have studied a cruise control that will adjust a car’s speed according to that of the cars in front of and behind it. That could reduce tailgating, one of the major road-rage triggers, said Reg Smart of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Far in the future, all driving may be automated, said Peter Frise, program leader of Auto21, a Canadian research consortium. Putting the car on autopilot could conceivably eliminate driver frustration and road rage.

Until then, if people can’t control their own tempers, perhaps the threat of being caught could keep them from harming others. Last year, Honda’s Great Britain division developed a Road Rage Personal Attack System as an option for its luxury cars. When a person feels like she’s about to be attacked by another driver, she sounds a 120-decibel alarm with a robotic voice screeching,...