Road rage, in a car near you

2003-07-08 21:41

Ziegfried Ekron

Cape Town - Experts say incidents of road rage, where motorists lose their tempers and attack fellow road users, will increase in future.

Karin Buter, a Paarl psychiatrist, says increased tensions in the community can be blamed to a large extent for the increase. It's virtually inevitable that road rage will increase.

"Obviously there are many other factors as well, but continued tension is a major cause.

"It sometimes happens that people who are not normally aggressive, all of a sudden cannot handle the pressure anymore. One can expect to hear of more such cases where people lose their tempers.

She thinks people often feel safer in their cars and can express their emotions more easily because normally there's no direct result.

Extreme cases such as the recent incident at the Canal Walk shopping mall where one motorist attacked another with a baseball bat, could possibly be attributed to other factors.

She says that most people have a built-in impulse control, which prevents them from boiling over.

"It's unusual to drive around with a baseball bat in the boot. One often finds that someone who reacts so violently, is also aggressive somewhere else."

Anesh Sukhai of the Medical Research Council says the council undertook a research project about road rage earlier this year.

"The results will be announced next month. It's quite difficult to measure the extent of road rage, because there's not enough statistics. It appears, though, as if the trend is increasing."

"It's clear that more cases are being reported, but it's difficult to say if road rage incidents happened in the past and everyone turned a blind eye."

- Die Burger