Not everyone killed by the COVID-19 pandemic was infected with the virus. The number of pedestrians killed by cars in the US surged in 2020 and 2021. Deaths from car crashes increased during the pandemic, too.
The most commonly cited cause for this increase in fatalities is the prolonged emotional tension created by the uncertain path of viral infection and unpredictable restrictions due to the global outbreak. Professor of psychology Frank Farley explains that driving during the pandemic served as one of very few activities that could take place outside of the home. As a result, struggles that have arise from the elimination of the public interactions that typically rely upon to remain socially connected and emotionally stable. “You’ve been cooped up, locked down, and have restrictions you chafe at,” Farley explained. “So if you can have an arousal breakout, you want to take it.”
Reckless driving and violent assaults by drivers are an outgrowth of resilience fatigue, the compounding strain that comes from the prolonged expectation of a performance of normal feelings in an abnormally challenging setting. Higher speeds and inattention to risk on the road have been a displaced manifestation of the desire to defy of social demands for constrained behavior such as social isolation, vaccinations, and the wearing of face masks. When large numbers of people who can no longer stand to stay within the lines of social expectations for safety get behind the wheel, an increase in fatal collisions is bound to happen.
The heightened state of emotional arousal leading to both accidental deaths and purposeful violence by drivers is commonly known as road rage. People experience road rage as a sudden and furiously irresistible impulse to drive in a dangerous manner or attack other people on the road. Sometimes, people feeling road rage will purposefully run red lights, ram other cars, or strike pedestrians with their cars. Road rage has even led some drivers to begin shooting their guns at other drivers from behind the wheel.
Like summit fever and rapture of the deep, road rage is an emotion that’s specific to the setting in which it takes place.
What’s special about the road that makes it such an emotionally volatile space? The road represents a provocative combination of the promise of free movement and the reality of stubborn traffic. People driving cars are expected to follow strict laws for social interactions as they’re moving down the road at high speed, but feel independent and untouchable within the glass and metal bubbles of their automobiles.
The road enrages us at times because it presents us with obstructions in the very moments when we’re hoping to get away from the responsibilities that restrict our movements. We feel locked down when we were seeking liberation, and when the tension between these competing factors gets to be too much, we snap. On the road, we’re forced to remain in certain lanes, traveling only in highly formalized patterns for the sake of collective safety. Our cars are vehicles of tremendous power that nonetheless disempower us.
When the burdens of the road meet the other troubles of life, road rage erupts. Traveling in one-ton vehicles at a mile a minute, the consequences of this emotional break are often deadly.
