Authors: Kevin Brennan
Every time I leapt off the bike with the red mist of rage cloud
ing my judgment, the intent was violence. Every time the walk to the offending vehicle was just enough for the voice of reason in my head to make itself heard and stop me from damaging the person, though not the vehicle.
The worst of the road rage, in my experience, is very short lived, but it doesn’t dissipate completely – there is always enough residue rage left behind it to incite monstrous behaviour from even the mildest mannered of us.
I have damaged lots of cars, taxis, vans, trucks and buses in road rage, mostly with kicks from motorbike boot clad feet but sometimes punches and even once a head butt (jumping off a bike and smashing the driver side mirror of a number ten bus on Baggot Street in a move that was quite impressive acrobatically). The after effect of this behaviour is always guilt – in varying intensities depending on the atrocities inflicted by me, followed shortly by fear which would normally naturally precede some pretty extreme acceleration.
The older and more experienced couriers, without exception, advise to drive on in rage situations and leave the dickheads behind you, although it is a given that this advice is dished out in a “do as I say not as I do” capacity. There’s not one person in this job that doesn’t snap.
Instead of lashing kicks at cars and screaming abuse at the drivers, the best approach to gobshites is to throttle away from them saying “get into my past, you eejit!” to yourself, possibly with a slow sad shake of the head at the driver if you make eye contact along the way. This simple gesture is as effective as kicks and screams at motorists because it drives them bananas.
Invariably, they jump up and down inside their little cages screaming that they had a right to do whatever stupid things they did, usually accompanied by frantic attempts at sign language to compound their justifications and often oblivious to the fact that their vehicle is still moving!
That’s exactly what happened to a taxi that had cut me off coming around the green onto Dawson Street on a warm but cloudy September Thursday afternoon. I got in front of him, stopped and flipped him the finger, behind which the slow sad
shake of the head was the ultimate criticism of his road manners. His fat, bald head turned crimson as he shouted words unheard by me and he took both hands off his steering wheel to mime his righteous version of events, without bothering to stop his car. I was right beside the back right hand side wheel of the car in front, stopped in the gap looking back at him when that car stopped, oblivious to the ape in the taxi whose full and undivided attention was focussed on angrily getting his perspective across to me instead of the path of his still moving vehicle.
The crunch was only a small one, a fender bender, which did nothing more than crack the plastics on both cars, but the ape’s reaction was priceless. He grabbed the steering wheel tightly with both hands as the blood drained from his shocked face - the face that wore the terrified expression that a schoolboy might wear after just putting a football through the headmaster’s office window. I tapped the bike into first gear and moved forward one and a half car lengths, partly to give the driver whose car had just been hit space to come and inspect the damage, but mostly to get a safe distance away for my own reaction to the accident - the cruel, tormenting, undefeatable pointing and laughing.
It must have only been seconds but it felt like a lot longer pointing my left forefinger back at him and laughing at the top of my voice, breaking off the pointing just to slap the top of my back box with glee a few times before resuming the pointing. I kept this up as the ape got out of his taxi to join the other motorist and as the ape tried to point to me as the cause of the incident and right up until the ape finally tried to run after me. I waited until he was nearly up to me and then clicked the bike into gear and moved forward two car lengths. He was still facing me when I stopped so I resumed with the pointing and laughing. Despite being out of breath he was infuriated enough to foolishly follow me again. Again I waited until he was almost on top of me but this time I moved forward four car lengths before resuming with the pointing and laughing. Having wasted enough of my valuable time on this idiot, I opted for a distance that I didn’t think he would make even if he was stupid enough
to try to run. He didn’t. The game was over; I had won. He stayed where he was sticking up his fingers and trying to shout abuse through wheezing, gasping, desperately unfit gulps of air. I put my bike into gear again, gave two short victory beeps of my horn and proceeded down Dawson Street, safe in the knowledge that my tax disc had two of the numbers of my registration well and truly covered.
Looking back on the incident I do feel a little bit sorry for him, but it was his rage, ignorance and negative reactions that caused the incident. If he had been a more considerate road user he wouldn’t have hit the car in front of him. If he had appreciated that he had been ignorant to me and accepted my reaction as justifiable he wouldn’t have incurred the expense of being responsible for damaging another vehicle. If he had been more like the lady on Frascati Road in Blackrock there would not have been an incident.
It was a dark and drizzly Monday afternoon. I was coming into Blackrock from Dun Laoghaire under a considerable amount of pressure to get a direct job delivered to Mount Street in Dublin 2. I also had two separate deliveries for Sandymount on my way in which I should have left until after the direct was dropped off, but that was four dead miles that I just wasn’t prepared to do. I was going to chance my arm and take the time to drop them both on the way in, even though it meant crossing those bastard train tracks over and back and the risk of horrendous waits at those horrible crossways. This decision, of course, increased the pressure that I was under immensely.
Aidan knew I had a direct job on board and that I would more than likely take the chance and bash out the other two en route, most couriers did, but I was still doing it without him telling me to. If things went smoothly, well and good, but if he got any hassle because of my decision I would be well and truly in the shithouse, which would end up costing me money on missed out wages, as pissing off the base controller invariably did. The real bummer about such situations was that if I did what the client expected and high tailed it straight to Mount Street and then told Aidan that I had to go back to Sandymount
with the other jobs, I could just as easily end up in the shithouse also, particularly if he had work lined up for me in D2 going some other direction.
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t; at the mercy of events and circumstances that are beyond my control. Knowing that somebody somewhere could be picking up the phone to make an enquiry or complaint that was going to rightly fuck up my day!
The only thing to do was make the decision, pray for no delays and drive like hell!
I sped through the traffic down Temple Hill, got a green light at the junction of Newtown Avenue, moved onto Frascati Road at a hell of a pace. I was well ahead of all traffic by the time I came to the junction of Carysfort Avenue, which was also green. Even though I had a good clear stretch of road ahead of me, I paused slightly on my way up to the junction – a good and possibly even life saving habit to be in.
Coming down Carysfort Avenue from Stillorgan was a certain well-to-do lady in her top of the range BMW. She was probably intending to go into the car park of the Blackrock Shopping Centre, or somewhere that side of the main street, because she took the left hand yield slip road onto Frascati Road instead of stopping at the light to go straight, which was red because of my green and then proceeded across the two lines of inward bound traffic to get herself into the right turn lane to go right onto Rock Hill. This took her right across my path as I was heading into town.
She wasn’t exactly coasting along either and she barely paused at the yield sign, seeing that there was “only” a motorbike coming. She made the common error of judgement, possibly due to the hurry she was in, and equated the smaller vehicle with a lower speed. In general, bikes tend to move faster than cars and just because a bike moving forward occupies less of the road doesn’t mean that it’s easy for that bike to avoid something that suddenly appears in its path. Actually, bikes often hit the deck in attempts to avoid obstacles that unexpectedly cross their paths, another reason not to pull out across the road when there is a motorbike approaching.
Thank God for the pause anyway, because I was pretty sharp onto the brakes as soon as I realised that her car wasn’t stopping. I was positioned roughly beside the line dividing the two lanes going way too fast to decelerate enough to swing to the left as the car swung right across the lane. I’m full sure that if I tried I would have smashed into the back of the car and - in the eyes of the law - been responsible for the crash. The other option was to swing right with the car and hopefully get stopped before it crushed me into the island that divided the inbound from the outbound traffic. That way there was also the chance that the driver of the car would become aware of what was going on and take evasive action.
I swung right without easing off the brakes and gave a long beep of the horn to alert the bitch that I was going to be crashing into her driver side if she didn’t do something about it. She did. She slammed on the brakes and adjusted her course to her left so as to give me space to run past her on the right. Basically, she did the right thing to avoid the collision, but not my wrath.
As it happened, we came to a stop beside each other with me beside her driver side door, the moment’s relief at not hitting her being quickly replaced with the volcanic eruption of rage,
This fucking cunt! How dare she! I thought. That fucking mirror is coming off for starters.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I screamed as her window moved smoothly and mechanically down, gradually revealing the well-preserved lady in her 50s with piercing blue eyes that were particularly wide because of the fright she had just had. She never broke eye contact with me, aggressive as I was and when she spoke she emphasised every word to hit home how genuine she was.
“I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”
It was as if she had waved a magic wand and dispelled the raging demons within me. I felt the tension muscles relax instantly as all of my vicious intentions left me with one big exhalation. All of a sudden my biggest concern was that this poor lady appeared to be on the point of bursting into tears.
“It’s Okay. No harm done. Maybe a longer look back in the
mirror next time? Remember that bikes move faster than cars. You go ahead there. Bye bye.”
I think of that lady often for a variety of reasons. Kudos to myself for the pause coming to the junction, but shame on me for not being more aware of the dangers involved where slip roads meet the main road, especially this one because such a high proportion of cars using it intend to head for the right hand turn lane.
Kudos to the lady for taking the appropriate action to avoid a collision, but shame on her for her error of judgement.
Most of all kudos to the lady for her heartfelt apology that instantly and totally diffused an explosive angry situation and prevented the nastiness that was surely about to happen. If everybody on the roads apologised the way she had the roads would be a much better place for all.
Sadly, the biggest reason that I think about that lady is that in all of my years driving motorbikes, of all the errors that other drivers have made in that time and all the damage done to me and my bikes and all the near misses and close calls that have scared the shite out of me, that well spoken, well-mannered example of how motorists should behave is the only person ever to apologise to me.
I have to say there is another reason for my diminishing tolerance with other road users – gang mentality. There are well over a thousand motorbike couriers covering Dublin every day and just about every one of them will pull over to help a brother courier who is having an episode with a motorist. The vast majority of this help involves persuading the irate colleague to get onto his bike and get out of there, but the back-up was always there if things ever got ugly. This feeling of having back-up tends to make men cocky and much more likely to do damage, especially in high rage incidents such as confrontations with motorists. I believe that the reduction of natural fear of conflict that we all have combined with the stress of the job and the adrenalin involved in riding a bike as hard as possible through traffic, turned me into the monster that I became before copping myself on and exercising more self control in conflict situations. I was
particularly inspired to change my attitude by one close call I had.
It was around 12 pm on a wet November Tuesday. I had been rained on since I started early at half eight that morning and the work had me all over the place with delays almost everywhere. I was not a happy chappy at all. I had swung right off the N11 at the top of Cornelscourt to cut through the village past the shopping centre and into the Bank of Ireland computer centre just before Cabinteely to collect a set call that should have been picked up at eleven o’clock.
I had manoeuvred through what little traffic there was in the village at a blistering pace – way too fast for the wet conditions – and had a clear road past the shopping centre. Almost automatically at this stage I wound the throttle full on in the absence of obstacles in front of me. This is not a good idea when passing a shopping centre, especially one as big as Cornelscourt. There’s no point complaining about a car exiting a car park at the worst possible time for you. In a situation where hundreds of cars make short visits every hour it’s just inevitable that somebody will.