I asked you: Why are we breaking traffic laws at the risk of our own lives?
What are people thinking of at the moment they break traffic laws?
The anwer is not a simple one and it takes time to get to the heart of the matter. I admit I am reaching for the right answer. My goal here is to make you THINK and to create your own conclusions. Should you do so, let me know what you come up with.

The HKP writes about human kindness everywhere, at work, home and all points in betweeen.  Since this article was originally written the number of deaths on highways in Ontario has skyrocketed.  Malcolm Gladwell's book 'The Tipping Point' would suggest we're having some kind of irresponsible aggressiveness driving spike to the point that highway deaths are becoming an epidemic.  Why are we driving so fast? Why are we doing too much that we leave too late and feel as though we have the 'right' to risk our lives and the lives of those around us when we're on the road?  The Ontario Provincial Police have admitted they no longer know what to do to bring people in line ... to get them driving withing the rules of the road and within reason.  Here is a look at life and human kindness in one essay about our driving habits.

Please: Be safe out there!

The Stories I Told Myself … about other bad drivers

When I watch other people drive through reds, bob and weave through traffic, roll around corners with stop signs, and even drive two abreast down the wrong side of a four lane road to duck down the side street (leaving no lanes available to drive the other way) I ask myself, “What is the matter with these people?” I also wonder what the risk-taking maneuver actually does for them because often, if I’m following them, I catch up to them at the next red light.

I get answers to my question, but before I reveal those, let me interrupt. We must watch the questions we ask ourselves because the mind always comes up with an answer. Ask, “Why am I always such a loser?” and the mind begins, “Well first there is …” Ask, “Why can’t I balance home life and work?” and the mind begins, “Well first you’re …”

So perhaps in that moment of panic, where someone else has done a wild car maneuver and risked their lives and mine, asking myself, “What is the matter with them?” might be natural, but it doesn’t yield very good and definitely not accurate answers. We have to look further than this to yield the right answers to what is going on.

My answer by the ways is, these drivers are selfish and ‘above the law.’ The rules of the road do not apply to them. I believe they are, ‘better than everyone else.’ There is a sense of entitlement that exists today so this answer seems logical. I believe they are ‘too cool’ to obey common laws! And I’m not alone in thinking like this. Others tell the same stories. YOU told me the same stories in your responses. While these are incorrect stories, I find ‘societal, collective stories’ fascinating.

This above the law story leads me to another, secondary story too. This is the one where I wish that I could do all the things these law-breakers do. I wish I could do these things and break the law flagrantly and get away with it. I convince myself I’m better than they are, because I refrain from breaking the law … and then, on a bad day, I go and do the same things anyway. It turns out I am no better than they are …

These stories are wrong because we have asked the wrong question in the heat of the moment. They are wrong because I know they are wrong, because I sometimes roll through stop signs and because I sometimes go through reds. The stories are wrong because I know I am not above the law. At the moment of law-breaking in traffic I don’t accelerate and think, “I can do this because I am better than everyone else.” I am positive that thought has never graced my brain at this juncture of my life. In addition neither am I cool, so I’m not driving through a red thinking, “Hey everyone, look how cool I am!” So that’s not the truth either.

I roll around stop signs because “I THINK” it’s a stupid place to put one and so I can ignore it. I roll around them because there’s no need to stop because I’ve never seen other traffic there. I drive through red lights at moments of inattention or because I’ve made a bad decision. And I rush red lights because I’m late or distracted. In addition I believe I do these things because there is a pretty low chance I will get caught.

I live with a double standard. Everyone else breaks the laws because of lies I was telling myself, but I break the laws because I am impatient, in a hurry, disorganized, or careless and because I think I won’t get busted.

Results of Poor Driving Habits on Society

Here are some too-real human complications that cause negative emotional stress in regards to auto accidents and if I can help you avoid these by making you a better driver the world is a better place.
First, some cities have adopted the vehicle reporting centre model to deal with accidents. When no one is hurt in an accident, the police no longer respond. Damaged cars are towed to the vehicle reporting centre where accident victims often sit across a desk from one another and fill out an incident report about what happened. Shocked, hurt, angry, upset people fill out unfamiliar forms. This is an act of cruelty which, if I cannot stop it, I can hope to make you a better driver to avoid it.

Second, the Province of Ontario legally requires all drivers to have auto insurance. While this is an overall good policy, it has had many negative repercussions. Today, if you are not hurt and can afford to repair your car without contacting your insurance company, do it. Typically if you have the insurer pay, the increased rates will be more than the cost of repairing it yourself. That’s what would have happened to me had my insurance broker not warned me of the consequences. To avoid the hurt of being forced to buy protection and feeling like you’re getting nothing for it, it’s best to avoid the accident in the first place.

Third the emotional and physical costs which occur should we be injured are horrific. Becoming a safer driver helps avoid potential months of recovery and the physical costs of being unable to work etc. Therefore we must find a way to practice a little human kindness on our roads.

Your Responses

The number of responses to my email questions was high and I thank you. I believe this topic is important to many. Most responses dealt with either the ‘stories’ we tell ourselves or they discussed the tragic, emotional reactions to real accidents. Poor driving habits are so imminently frightening they create a very real emotional response. But to solve the problem of why we’re regularly messing up, we need to elevate ourselves above emotion if we can. This is not an attempt to downplay our emotions or our natural reactions to real accidents: never that – I’ve been there, remember? Somehow we have to push past this response to try and find some real answers.

I’d say that if you asked anyone after an accident if they were pleased they had caused it, they would look at you as if you were an alien. No one desires the potential negative consequences of an accident, yet many of us are willing to risk them all the same.

For anyone who has suffered personal loss due to a traffic accident, I am truly and profoundly sorry. It is my goal here to find out what is really going on so I can prevent the next accident from occurring.

Some Real Facts

Here are some traffic facts from a CBC Radio One interview where a decades-experienced OPP traffic officer revealed the following: In the past 20 years death on highways in North America has been on a steady decline. Only this year, has the United States seen a slight increase – the first in the same time period. The 400 series highways in Ontario are amongst the safest roads of their kind in North America. (This fact has now changed within the past year!)

Sadly there was no indication of how much safer automobiles have become in that same 20 year time frame and there were no statistics on accidents in general, so the decline in traffic deaths may have nothing to do with how we’re driving but on the increased safety of the vehicles. The officer did say, however, that people have developed essentially a zero tolerance for drinking and driving and that this fact has helped in the decline of fatalities.

First on the list of causes for accidents was excessive speed resulting in 33% of all accidents. Second on the list for causes at 20%, was multi-tasking: drinking coffee, talking on the phone, using a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or reading reports or the daily paper. Both of these causes for accidents may, in part, be as a result of longer commutes. In relation to multi-tasking the officer said, “We see that the further people have to drive to work each day, the more there is the tendency to do something else while driving to work.”

What’s interesting about that comment is that in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and why we became more and more civically disengaged, he blames the urbanization and commuting for approximately 10 percent of the decline in our involvement. It would seem that there is just ‘something wrong’ about how we live and build our cities – but that’s another article.

What is also interesting is that both driving too fast and multi-tasking suggests we do not have enough time to do the things we need to do. Time seems to be the big bugaboo in this discussion. The next question is, “Why don’t we have enough time to allow us to drive responsibly?”

Lastly Greg Schinkel of Unique Development wrote, “When measuring safety in companies, they refer to incidents and accidents. Incidents are those things that could have resulted in an accident but fortunately did not. After enough incidents, there likely will be an accident. So it is with my flirting with intersections. I realize that at some time or another I will pay for the incidents.”

My personal questions have become the same as Paul’s in Romans chapter 8: “Why do we fail to do for ourselves the things we know we need to do for ourselves?” Conversely, then, when it comes to bad driving we must ask, “Why do we continue to do the things we know are bad for us, when we know they are bad for us?”

I think the answer to those questions are the same:
-- We fall deeply and easily into trances. Expressed another way, we let our brains run on autopilot too much of the time. We disengage when we should be engaged.

-- We lack the vision to see the long term benefits of starting the right things or stopping the wrong things.

-- We’re afraid to be seen as different. We hate to be called Pollyanna but perhaps we have to ask, what’s wrong with that?

-- Lastly the cost of changing our existing patterns appears to be too great. We’re too in love with where we are – for good or ill – so we refrain from doing to stopping to do the things required to make our lives better.

Definitions and Solutions

Trances are everywhere but are best demonstrated when you arrive home in your car and have no recollection of the roads you traveled to get there. You were in a deep trance in this instance. Trances occur when patterns develop … like the tendency to work too long and not leaving enough time to travel to a meeting (me). Trances can be good or bad but what we must do is become aware of them. We need to bust trances whenever we can before we enter the rut. We need to place speed-bumps in our lives, like placing dots on our watches to compel us to think about what we’re doing. The problem is, soon the dot on the watch becomes a trance. We really need to begin to do different things more often – take new routes home, find a new way of performing a task at work which is still effective and efficient. I believe our species tends to flow towards lower levels of energy than higher ones and this allows trances to begin. We must work to keep our minds active, to embrace regular change in order to continue to improve and avoid trances. Naturally, once we start doing this, we create a new trance …

Lack of vision for big picture trends appears to be another human trait. Remember the Catholic Priest who bowed before Desmond Tutu? A white priest stepped to the side of the road and let Tutu and his mother pass. As they passed, the priest bowed. Tutu had never before seen a white man pay deference to a black man. When he asked his mother why the white man had done this she told him because he was a man of God. Tutu committed his life to Christ at that moment.

The priest may never have known that his one simple act of piety changed young Tutu’s life forever. The man of God could have walked away thinking that no one even noticed his bows of respect and he could have stopped doing this pious act in the next moment. I wish that at irregular moments of our lives (irregular because to do it regularly would simply create another trance) we could all experience an “It’s a Wonderful Life,” moment. You know the Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore story of a young man who sacrifices his dreams for his family’s old Savings and Loan business. The Stewart character ends up thinking his life has no meaning because he never actualized his dreams (world travel), but he single-handedly made the entire place of Bedford Falls a wonderful town to live in. He made a phenomenal difference to the people of that town but he never recognized it on his own. Then one day he’s desperate and considers killing himself. An angel comes down from heaven and proves to Stewart’s character of the difference he has made in the lives of the people around him. The angel pulls Stewart, or George Bailey, out of the world as though he never existed. The world without George, turned out to be a pretty nasty place.

We are all a little like that character George Bailey: we all need to know what we do makes a difference in the world. Some days, it is extremely hard to practice human kindness when we cannot see the difference we are making. This story alone proves that we absolutely must tell people what we think of them in no uncertain terms on a regular basis. I mean we need to thank one another for being there and doing the right thing. This act of kindness is the greatest support we can offer one another. It is the greatest way we have of motivating one another and to help us see that we are not foolish for daring to be different in doing the right thing. And if we do get what we send in life, if we promote other people’s good works and deeds, others will honor our efforts and reward us and this makes for a far kinder world.

The fear of being different weighs heavily upon us. When we’re little, before we hit our teen years, we’re all different and we’re okay with that. When hormones strike, we’re terrified of not being liked or of being different from everyone else. If I’m right and humans tend to naturally slide to the lowest common denominator unless we strive to make the effort then the desire to be positive, upbeat souls, means we simply won’t fit in. We forget to fight and keep others upbeat, and instead let them drag us back down to a lower level. Existence is easier here. We need to continue to dare to be different, to celebrate that difference and to reward it whenever we see it. We need to keep our visionaries as visionaries, not place blinders over their eyes and tell them to keep quiet and sit in the corner.

Fear of change seems to be the greatest fear of all. In tandem with the fear of change is the very great amount of energy we must use to break the old patterns. In addition we must begin to accept that there is a natural pattern to help us accept change which relates close to the grieving of the death of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In fact, the death of an old behavior for a new one is like the death of a part of ourselves.

Whenever we desire to stop doing a bad trance or to start doing a new trance, we will experience discomfort because the flow of our lives will be changed. As this flow is changed, we tend to want to fall back into the old pattern. I believe we significantly underestimate the energy required to lift ourselves out of the trench and walk away from it, regardless of whether or not the trench was bad or good for us. Ultimately, for life to become better we must find this energy and ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyways’ according to the title of Susan Jeffer’s book.

It is vital to point out that should we dare to change: to stop doing a bad thing or to start doing a new, good thing, that, depending on the size of the change, we should limit ourselves to one change at a time. Change means spending energy. Change means maintaining focus. Trying to change too many things at once will zap your energy, weaken your efforts due to exhaustion, distract your attention from each thing you’re trying to do and you will slide back to the previous place on all fronts. Change one thing at a time.

You think I jest? A man who was torn up by child abuse said his life was unbearable the way it was but he resisted doing what he needed to do to become whole because he knew his old life and didn’t know who he would become in the new one. He was afraid of losing himself in the process of his own recovery. I site his story as vital because he did succeed in part because his therapist told him, “Do only the other things in life that you must essentially do because the recovery process is exhausting.” She told the truth as the man said, “I worked on recovery and otherwise I slept for about six months. I was exhausted the entire time.” While this example of change is extreme, it demonstrates the point well.

Is this a long way from bad driving? Perhaps, but let’s ask this question, “How would you have to change your life to become a better driver?” Does it mean giving up a volunteer board position that you love, doing less work at the office and evoking the wrath of your boss, dropping down a level of seniority at work to reduce responsibilities and incurring financial stress, changing careers entirely and accepting all the stress that brings, or helping your kids decide which week-night activity they’re going to drop because you just cannot rush to that many places as often as you do and then risk their unhappiness? The loss of income, the increase in short-term stress, combined with the effort to continue to work at the new behavior, you’re children complaining that they never get to do all the things they want … all of these things come with a short-term cost – and so we’re likely to remain where we are than change for the better, even when we know we should change.

The great back-lash to all of this rushing around and trying to do everything and be everything to everyone creates another cost. Something about all of that drives us to watch, on average, four hours of television a day. Here’s my theory and I welcome you to blow it up. The correctness of my theory is less important than the effort of thinking about what it is we’re doing to ourselves and our society and at least trying to come up with some answers. If you have a better one, let me know.

Here’s my stab at things. What if we subconsciously know that we’re giving up too much of ourselves at work and all other activities and watching television is a backlash that we never have enough time for ourselves … even though we might include some of the things we do for ourselves in our list of activities as ‘fun.’ We’re supposed to work too long, we’re supposed to exercise because the media says we have to be fit (well it’s just plain good for us too, but we don’t have to be buffed like movie stars either), we’re supposed to be super parents and take our kids to at least one activity every night, we’re supposed to volunteer, and we’re supposed to have perfectly clean houses and yards. What if we’re grudgingly doing all of these things and the one place where no one can interfere with ME is in front of the television? Thoreau said, “We’re leading lives of quiet desperation.” We’re watching so much television like it’s a way of getting back at our own lives for making us feel so hurried and rushed and as a result … such bad drivers.

Here’s something interesting about the television watching revenge we wreak upon ourselves. In a scientific study on ‘brain sex’ or how the different sexes use their minds when it is engaged, they tried to find a situation where the brain was completely disengaged. They wanted to find a low-level normal to compare against higher function usage. They placed people in front of a blank wall and found a light amount of activity in the brain. Next they placed them in front of a television and the brain wave activity actually went down. Apparently when we’re in front of a blank wall the brain becomes bored and we use our imagination to think about ‘something’ but in front of a television we think about nothing: we become zombies.

It’s also important to note that Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, also sites television as 40 per cent of the reason why we have become civically disengaged. While television watching is not in this instance a cause of being a bad driver, it may be a reflection of how we’re living our lives by doing too much, driving too fast and silently, passionately disliking how we’re living … so we’ll watch TV instead – to hell with anyone else!

Is it too much to say, is it too big of a leap in logic to say that we drive through reds, roll around stop signs, speed and do other stupid things in traffic because of the following?

We have an identity crisis. Think about it. We are not human beings anymore, we are human doings. We attach ourselves to our deeds. We ARE our deeds, our jobs, our roles, our activities, our work-outs. We are what we do. This life strategy compels us to do too much and then we are forced to rush on our roads to go to the next thing we have to ‘do’ in order to be a good person. In today’s workplace it’s a badge of honor to prove how much overtime we work. Somewhere after the lean and mean 80s and 90s we’ve simply accepted the ‘do too much’ mantra and we’ve allowed ourselves to enter a trance where it is acceptable to be too busy to be careful on our roads. I’ve written about employees who feel like bad parents because they are not spending enough time with their children but once their child is sick and they stay home to look after the child they then feel like they are not a good employee because they’re spending too much time looking after their children. There has to be a way for us to win at life which this scenario fails to offer. This scenario says, “We’re never enough!”

I believe we fail to use our brains in the way we were meant to. We are often disengaged. We let a ‘tranced society’ lead us to live a life in individual trances. Too few people like those of you reading this article stop to think about what we’re actually doing. We’re literally driving ourselves to early graves (incidents leading to accidents) but it is okay as long as we get away with it! We accept our own ‘stupid stories’ about other people thinking they’re better than us when breaking traffic laws when in reality, for most of us traffic violations are about not having enough hours in the day to live our lives. And this would all be readily accepted … if we had the time to stop and think about what we’re doing.