Compassion: The Antidote to Road Rage

Standing at an intersection of Everett Avenue (a primary connection to Interstate 405) on a sweltering 99 degree afternoon I felt exposed. I pictured an aging buffalo on the edge of the herd being stalked by a pack of wolves, and my unease intensified.  There was no shade, no stop sign, and two lanes of traffic were streaming past. Suddenly a car slowed to a stop, and the car in the next lane did the same.  Having lived the majority of my life in Central Florida, I am not genetically predisposed for such civility and I lurched forward and reveled in my good fortune.  I lived in a community that had mitigated the barbarism of road rage. 

A 2012 study found 80 percent of Orlando drivers failed to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, a key indicator of why the City Beautiful has the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation.  It also topped the list of “angriest cities,” which included a host of road raged Florida cities. The benighted streets of Metropolitan Orlando are horrific. Engineered for traffic flow at the expense of human safety, they are a constant reminder of the myopic vision that still encumbers urban American.

If Metro Orlando's driving death rate were applied nationwide, fatalities would soar by 15,000. By contrast, applying pedestrian-friendly Portland’s rate would reduce fatalities by 15,000.  The Orlando Sentinel is awash with accounts of gruesome traffic “accidents” and of humans being impaled by speeding motor vehicles.  

For a class project, I once had students create poster boards documenting bicyclist and pedestrian deaths.  They also received "trigger warnings" as these fatalities occur weekly on average.  I cancelled the assignment within a month, it was simply too grisly. An appaling hit and run incident was the last straw. A man biking on a bridge over the Florida Turnpike was struck at high speed and knocked over the railing and onto the multi-lane toll road.  The Sentinel reported:

A number of cars and trucks stuck the body repeatedly. Only one motorist stopped after flattening a car tire on the bicycle seat or other debris. A second motorist, the driver of a car carrier, told police later he thought he hit the mangled carcass of a deer.  He reported what happened after reaching his destination...and finding a right hand on the carrier.

 

Students were horrified and puzzled.  Were humans that insensitized to their surroundings or were they simply cruel insensate beings? We discussed Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where individuals are inured from thought, nature, and meaningful interaction and driving mimics the chariot scene from Ben-Hur.  A car of teens “whistling, yelling, hurrahing” encounter “a very extraordinary sight, a man strolling, a rarity, and simply said," Bradbury writes, "Let's get him." The man becomes their prey.  

Bradbury had a genius for exposing the fine line between civilization and barbarism. In a society where humans worship the machines they drive, the line is crossed too often. Americans suffer the highest incidence of traffic deaths in the industrialized world, and the rate of these fatalities has tripled since Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953. https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2016/08/26/morbid-and-mortal-toll-sprawl

The American love affair with the automobile has lessened civility.  Prior generations rode trains and streetcars, and passengers had to follow rules and even sacrifice their comfort to make the ride tolerable for others.  In automobiles, we are encapsulated in metal and glass and prone to the illusion we are driving alone.  “The illusion has seeped into every crevice of our public and private lives, persuading us that sacrifices are no longer necessary,” Stephen Carter writes in Civility.  “We care less and less about our fellow citizens, because we no longer see them as our fellow passengers. We may see them as obstacles or competitors, or we may not see them at all.”

Yet on the street corner in Portland a driver did see me in obvious discomfort, and stopped to let me escape my predicament.  Are Portlanders better than other people? Perhaps not, but they are aware of their fellow citizens.  I’ve learned the jiu jitsu of hand signals that allow me to converse with drivers and navigate the city.  In greater Orlando the sign language is usually a single finger, perhaps a salute to the number of viable transportation options until the SunRail Commuter line opened in 2014.

The fact that Portlanders walk, bike, and use transit to commute at relatively high rates has produced a measure of empathy.  This behavior is lampooned in an episode of Portlandia where overly polite drivers never leave an intersection as they wait for the other person to go.  But it is real and it comes to fore, especially after a tragedy. 

Last week fifteen-year old Fallon Smart was killed in a crosswalk by a speeding driver. A call to action for safe streets ensued. Several hundred people biked from City Hall to the site where the teen died. Flowers adorned the crosswalk and a sign read, “Stop the Killing Now.” Smart was memoralized and there were pleas to make the city’s “Zero Death Policy” a reality. There were few dry eyes. Jonathan Maus, a bicycle activist, remarked, “I’m sick of covering rides like this. Our streets are dominated by killing machines and the absurdity of that fills me with rage.”http://bikeportland.org/2016/08/26/a-life-lost-too-soon-photos-from-the-fallon-smart-memorial-ride-190481

Fallon Smart Memorial Ride (from Bike Portland)

Portland is not an urban utopia. The absurdity Ray Bradbury envisioned in Fahrenheit 451 lurks here as it does in every American city; a mechanized specter fueled by ignorance and malice.  At the same time, Portland is creating an alternative to the autocentric lifestyle, and the effort is breeding compassion.  I experienced it on a street corner on a hot day, and it was in full view as citizens mourned a senseless death.  This is no small feat. "Compassion, the experienced participation in the suffering of another person,” Joseph Campbell writes, “is the beginning of humanity.”

Memorial for Fallon Smart (from Bike Portland)