Tailgating. Frenetic use of horns. Blowing through red lights. Passing on double yellow lines. Speeding.
If you’re driving on the roads these days you’ve noticed an increase in all of these behaviors. It doesn’t seem to matter where you live, or where you happen to be driving: Whether you’re on the Interstate or trundling down a bumpy country road, it’s becoming more of a novelty to witness polite, respectful behavior of folks behind the wheel and more and more common to see sheer assholery predominating on this country’s roadways.
And as noted by one of many sources, it’s not your imagination.
If you thought people have been driving kind of recklessly these days, you're not mistaken. And experts are putting the blame squarely on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fatalities from car wrecks are up 7% in 2020 and 18% in just the first 6 months of this year — the highest in 14 years.
According to the folks responsible for keeping track of driver behavior, at the outset of the pandemic the fact that there were far fewer vehicles on the roadway apparently prompted many Americans to channel their inner “Mad Max,” disregarding speed limits and other traffic safety laws in order to get to wherever it was they wanted to go, and to hell with anyone who had the misfortune of getting in their way.
Experts say the bad behavior is a direct reflection of the mental state of the nation. The pandemic has left us feeling isolated, lonely and depressed, and it's affecting how we drive.
However once people got out and about again, the problem didn’t go away. It just became “Mad Max” with more cars on the road. One statistic was noted in particular: deaths for those in poorer communities have risen faster than the death rate overall, a disparity that some believe “could reflect a deeper sense of despair in the poorer communities hit hardest by the pandemic,” and the fact that lower-income Americans made up the lion's share of the so-called “essential workers,” many required to be on the road just to get to work, or to make deliveries for places like Amazon and UPS, for example, where credit for work performance was related to speed and efficiency.
Bad driving during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, shows no particular fealty to one’s economic status:
In New York City, super cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis blazed down empty streets, with roaring engines disturbing residents trying to sleep. Motorists from coast to coast were ticketed at eye-watering speeds.
The genesis of some of these attitudes towards driving has also been linked directly by some psychiatric professionals to other sociological factors. To this point, the roadways are one of the few places where all Americans, regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs, tend to trust each other implicitly. It’s a trust borne largely out of self-preservation: one slight miscalculation — one instant of distraction, one wrong move — can endanger not only others, but ourselves as well.
It follows, then, that when a subset of the population determines itself to be exempt from other social considerations and responsibilities (such as wearing a mask to prevent infecting others with a virus, or honoring other people’s choices in democratic elections) that they would channel that same sense of disregard to the act of driving.
Dr. David Spiegel is the Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford University:
Beyond identifying risks, Dr. Spiegel said there are also the risk takers. NHTSA research uncovered driving patterns have changed significantly since March 2020's public health emergency declaration. Behaviors such as speeding, driving under the influence and driving unbuckled.
Dr. Spiegel believes these actions by drivers reflect discontent seen throughout the pandemic.
"If I don't have to get a vaccination, I don't have to stop at red lights, I don't have to obey speed limits," he critiqued. "That attitude about not having social responsibility is very dangerous."
As noted above, the phenomenon of dangerous driving isn’t limited to any particular region or driving environment: “The same stats reflecting 2020 numbers show fatalities are up on city roads, rural areas, highways and backroads. There have been upticks day or night, and among every age group between 16 and 65.”
"That fundamental disrespect for social norms is damaging to all of us," Dr. Spiegel continued. "And it's endangering all of us. It really is."
The executive chair of the Governor’s Highway Safety Association agrees:
“Anecdotally, we hear from governors’ offices around the country that it’s a symptom and a sign of the overall lack of consideration we’re showing for other citizens, whether it be wearing masks, or not getting vaccinated, or how we drive,” he said. “It’s very aggressive. It’s very selfish.”
NHTSA’s research regarding driving habits since the pandemic began also showed a noticeable increase in injuries to people who weren’t wearing seatbelts, reflecting an increased penchant for risk-taking as well as a blithe disregard of basic principles of physics: if your car crashes into a wall, for example, at a speed of 60 MPH, the car stops, but your body continues to travel at 60 MPH --until it strikes something inside the vehicle. And human bodies are not designed to crash into objects like steering wheels, dashboards or windshields at 60 MPH. They're really not, airbags notwithstanding.
One of the things I remember my Dad saying to me after I’d gotten my driver’s license was that people’s personalities instantly change when they’re behind the wheel. I think it’s more accurate to suggest that their real personalities appear, and what we see revealed in peoples’ driving habits is often a symptom of their ability to cope with external stressors.
However, when one of those assholes in a pickup truck blows by me on the road at a rate twice the speed limit, I admit I don’t particularly reflect on their sociological motivations. I generally content myself with the fact that people who drive this way more often than not end up badly, whether through a driving mishap or at some other point in their lives.
In any event, the cumulative psychological effects resulting from the pandemic’s drastic upheaval of people’s lives, the unstable and polarized political state of the country, combined with a substantial uptick in substance and alcohol usage have had a predictable effect:
“Some people may have, as a coping mechanism, turned to letting out some of their frustration on the road or using substances, or a combination of the two,” Dr. Johnathon Ehsani of Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health told Inside Edition.
Bottom line — be extra careful out there!