Drivers witnessing lots of road rage, but few say they’re the ones doing it

The numbers don’t seem to add up. A survey of drivers by insurance site rates.ca found that many more drivers say they have witnessed road rage than admit to having participated in it themselves.

And while this could be because one incident can be seen by many people (or because relatively few people are responsible for a large number of incidents), it also suggests that people are not self-reporting their own rageful behaviours.

The survey polled 745 Ontarians and 235 Albertans between July 12 and 13 this year. It found that, in Ontario, five per cent of drivers say they have rolled down their window to yell at someone, whereas 35 per cent say they have seen such behaviour. Numbers in Alberta were similar, with four per cent saying they had yelled out the window, and 31 per cent saying they’d witnessed it.Other road-rage behaviours included obscene gestures, which eight per cent of drivers in both provinces said they had done, while 41 per cent had seen it done. Overall, 81 per cent of Ontarians said they had witnessed some form of road rage, with six per cent admitting to doing it. In Alberta, those figures were 80 per cent and seven per cent.Recommended from Editorial Arrests made in violent road rage incidents in Toronto area Calgarian charged after man dies in road rage incident Other angry activities included honking, flashing lights, tailgating, brake-checking (tapping the breaks at a tailgater), cutting someone off or, at the extreme end of the scale, stopping and exiting the vehicle to confront another person, or hitting another vehicle. In each case, more drivers said they had witnessed such behaviour than reported doing it themselves.The study noted that while there is no precise definition of road rage, and no penalties for shouting or making obscene gestures, there are laws against dangerous, careless or distracted driving, and conviction could result in demerit points, court costs and (of particular interest to rates.ca) higher insurance premiums.“Usually, careless driving is the end result of an at-fault collision, where the driver has proved to be careless or reckless,” said Daniel Ivans, a rates.ca auto insurance expert, adding that if a driver uses their vehicle unlawfully – for instance, tailgating, cutting off drivers, braking abruptly – and it results in a collision, the damage coverage would be void when processing the claim.Additionally, a conviction like careless driving or a collision could make it harder to obtain insurance from standard companies. “You would be obliged to go with a non-standard insurer where insurance premiums are three, five, or even ten times higher,” Ivans said.And while convictions eventually fall off one’s driving records, there are higher premiums in the meantime. “We’re talking about possibly accumulating tens of thousands of dollars (in increased payments),” he said.A separate study, this year’s Rage Index from Pollara Strategic Insights, found that drivers were most annoyed by fellow motorists who blew through stop signs or red lights, with 54 per cent of respondents saying it made them very angry, and 34 per cent reporting being moderately angry, for a total (with rounding) of 89 per cent.Other anger-inducing driving activities included people who don’t signal, tailgaters and people who cut others off in traffic, all with 84 per cent saying it made them angry. Just below that at 82 per cent each were people talking on cellphones while driving, and those who speed up when someone is trying to pass them.And it’s not helping that urban driving continues to worsen. The most recent Global Traffic Scorecard from 2023 looked at six Canadian cities and found that hours lost to bad traffic had increased since the previous year in all but one.The worst increase was in Calgary, where drivers lost an average of 23 hours a year, a 28 per cent increase from the year before. In absolute terms, Toronto had the highest numbers, with 63 lost hours per year, representing a 21 per cent increase. Other cities with increases were Montreal (20 per cent), Edmonton (14 per cent) and Vancouver (10 per cent). The lone Canadian city on the study that saw traffic improve was Winnipeg, where the time lost fell by just one per cent.

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