Road Rage Experiment

It normally takes me 20 minutes to get into work, but with traffic it takes almost 30 minutes. When I tell people in other cities like Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta this fact, they laugh at me -- they would kill to have our traffic "problem". People here in Cincinnati don't realize how good they've got it in terms of traffic.

Still, it amazes me what horrible drivers are in my city when they get into traffic ... tailgating is the norm, turn signals are optional, merging is just a suggestion, and all lanes are equal (high speed lane for passing only -- HA!).

People get so mad at each other while driving ... fingers flying everywhere, tapping brakes on purpose in heavy traffic, etc. And what happened to the little "thank you" wave or gesture when you let someone in or you cut someone off?

I thought I would try a little experiment driving into work this morning. I kept track of two things.
(1) I let every single car in front of me who wanted to merge, sneak in, or just plain cut me off ... and I counted the number of people who waved to me after doing so.
(2) I noted the number of people who tailgated me (tailgating was defined as I could not see their headlights in my rear view mirror ... pretty darn close in my humble opinion!).

So ... here are the much anticipated results:
(1) I let 24 cars (yes, 24 -- aren't I a nice person?) in front of me, and 2 waved.
(2) Number of tailgaters ... 5, so not that bad except for the one jerk who kept scaring the crap out of me because he would not pass me and tailgated me the whole way through downtown!

Pretty sad, people. Some interesting notes on my experiment:
(1) The drivers that cut me off had cars that cost more than my house ... Lexus, BMW, Mercedes were big offenders (shout out to the Acura MDX that did wave).
(2) Most of the cars that tailgated me were beaters that I'm surprised they got off the cinder blocks in the front yard that morning to drive around town.
(3) Most of the "cutter-offers" were older, professionals while the tailgaters were young, college -age students.
(4) Most of the drivers that cut me off had a certain political affiliation prominently displayed on their car. I don't want to start a political commentary here by saying who it was, but I'll give you a hint ... "W".