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So not only are roads more crowded than ever, but they are crowded with drivers whom science has now discovered to be extremely touchy. Modern life offers plenty of ready-made excuses for bad driving, and here as elsewhere time seems to be of the essence: there's just not enough of it. When police departments in the Washington area launched a program to crack down on aggressive driving last year, cops handed out some 60,000 tickets in 28 days for offenses ranging from tailgating to passing on the right. The most common excuse: "I'm late."
So many miles, so little time. For Ron Remer, 47, a soft-spoken salesman, offensive driving was simply part of the job. From his home in New Haven, Conn., he logged 30,000 miles a year selling promotional products. "People on the road were an impediment to my progress," he says. "If I was late, it would reflect badly on me. Maybe the customer wouldn't want the products, and I'd be out of a sale. Getting there was the only thing that was important. If I met you in person, I might invite you for coffee or something. But on the road, you were in my way."
Remer says he's reformed now, having had one of those little epiphanies that sometimes come to people who are pulled over by the state police. He was stopped one night on the narrow and unlighted Merritt Parkway in Connecticut after a high-speed race with another car, and soon thereafter he enrolled in a seminar for aggressive drivers. "I was lucky to recognize my problem and try to fix it," he says.
Other road warriors are unrepentant. Alan Carter, 43, a computer specialist from North Carolina and a self-described "aggressive driver," has his own vision of a perfect commute: one with no other cars in sight. "I don't want anyone in front of me. Any time. I think maybe this type of thinking has its roots in the minutiae of territorial rights and typical American individualism. But I don't really think about the deeper meanings. I just know that someone else is in my space or in the space I want."
Carter doesn't have to search for deeper meanings; that is a job for paid professionals, of whom, in America, there are many. Their theories range from the sociological to the psychological to the quasi political. "There is a greater diversity of road users now than at any other time in history," says Hawaii's James. "Therefore streets are not reserved for the optimum, skilled driver but accommodate a variety of driver groups with varying skill, acuity and emotional control"--jerks, in nontechnical lingo. And unlike in previous generations, the willingness to be a jerk on the road is no longer confined to a single sex.
Ed Sarpolus, the head researcher for the Michigan study of driving behavior, was struck by the gender breakdown of aggressive drivers: 53% of them are women. "There is a tremendous cultural shift taking place," he says. "Men still outnumber women in pure numbers, but women are not only increasing, they are not falling off as they get older. Women have fought to be equal in the workplace and in society, and now they're fighting to be equal behind the wheel. [Our] data are full of soccer moms."