The toll Nassau’s traffic takes on us

After crossing over from Village Road to Soldier Road, in the left lane, the driver to the right of me cut across me to turn into the drive-through of one of the fast food restaurants on the corner. Luckily, I anticipated that the person would do something foolish, so I drove with an abundance of caution so I did not end up in an accident. On the same day, I was the second car in the left lane on Bernard Road, waiting to turn onto Soldier Road when a driver went up the middle lane and turned left in front of the cars in my lane that were correctly waiting for a green light.

I learned to drive in an environment where everyone seemed to drive with aggression. People did not wait to be let of our corner. They, instead, inched their cars out of corners, eventually forcing someone to stop because they blocked the road enough to warrant the use of brakes. They may have received a free curse-out too. The pushing out of corners remains the same, but the other cars come fast and furious, in the true sense of the phrase. Some of them cannot stop fast enough. Some of them refuse to use their brakes, daring the person inching their way out of the corner to keep doing it. The person trying to come out of the corner may decide that they would like to force the driver with the right of way, whether or not they are speeding, to test their brakes, so they keep pushing. Maybe they caause it, maybe they are hit with high impact by the speeding car. It is a foolish game, and more people seem to be playing it than not.

My friend and fellow advocate Erin Greene raises the issue of traffic on a daily basis, sharing anecdotes of the dangerous driving she witnesses and near-misses she experiences. It does not even take ten minutes of being on the road before one encounters a person who has decided that their rush to get where they are going or their adrenaline rush from doing nonsense is more important than people’s lives, often including their own. This, as Erin Greene regularly points out, is a metaphor for the social environment we are constantly creating for ourselves.

People get into the driver’s seat and feel a sense of power that they do not feel when they are not controlling a motorised vehicle. They are able to engage with other drivers in a way that is far from socially acceptable in any other circumstance. The car becomes a weapon and the aggressive use of the car is a threat that it will be used against anyone in its path. Many drivers become bullies. While most drivers would mutter to themselves or the people in their cars with them, people now put their windows down to verbally assault other drivers and, in some cases, pedestrians. Some put their cars in park, jump out, and (try to) start physical fights in the road.

Not being let out of a corner is seen as disrespect. Not being able to stop a driver from getting out of a corner somehow deflates the ego. Getting into a parking space before another driver, who was obviously waiting for the space, is a triumph. Carelessly overtaking the vehicle ahead, causing the driver of an oncoming vehicle to swerve out of the way, is fun. Driving while drunk, endangering everyone on the road, is brag-worthy. Blowing horns to pressure other drivers to break the law, from running red lights to endangering the lives of pedestrians trying to cross the road, is satisfying. Slowing down to annoy the driver behind is hilarious. Stopping to gawk at and take photos and videos of an accident scene, offering no assistance, is second nature.

Other drivers, when in vehicles, are not seen as real people. People get behind the wheels of cars and seem to think they have been transported to a video game. It is all about them. No one else on the road is real. There are no other lives of value. The goals are to get to the destination, to get there quickly, to have the kind of “fun” that only comes from taking ridiculous risks, and the biggest, baddest bully on the road at that time, and not necessarily in that order.

It is even more frustrating that we see police on the road who we know must see what we see. They see the illegal and reckless driving we see, and they often choose not to respond. We know the hotspots where the most foolish behavior takes place, and we know that they know too, but they never position themselves there. We know that the people who drive like no one else matters and notice there are few consequences are likely to test limits in other ways. Law-abiding people are insulted by the inaction on traffic infractions, especially as taxes increase (when there are many traffic fines to issue and collect) and traffic fatalities flood social media.

Traffic in the streets of New Providence tell us more than we would like to know about one another. Impatience may be the least of the problems we see there. The endless anger and the need to express it, by any means, are not to be taken lightly. How is it that a person becomes so incensed by another driver’s reasonable caution that they get out of their vehicle to instigate a fight, with or without a weapon? What does it mean when so many of us try not to react to the ludicrous behavior we see on the road because “they might have a gun” and we do not want to become the country’s next murder victim? Most people who do not work from home start their days with the kind of frustration that should not live in anyone at nine o’clock in the morning, but that is a consequence of driving to work.

We all complain about customer service and it not being our fault that people hate their jobs, but we are all less than cheerful after an hour in traffic, guessing what other drivers will do and trying to avoid the consequences of their actions. How could we not be exhausted by the time we get to our destinations? There is pent up frustration that has to go somewhere, and without the ability to recognize and manage our emotions, without the safety of talking about our feelings without being judged, and without the freedom to take a few minutes to recalibrate, it is almost inevitable that an relatively innocent person will bare the brunt of out frustration.

Living in New Providence, truth be told, is hard. Having to drive everywhere we go is difficult. The lack of safe, reliable public transportation to get to and from work and school is inconvenient and costly. Living in a society plagued by violence that seems, at times, to be indiscriminate or rooted in petty motivations, is scary and tiring. We are always on guard. We are always in defense mode. The tension wreaks havoc on our minds and bodies.

There is an anger problem here. There is a widespread attempt to push back against the lack of control that people have in their lives. There is little value assigned to human life, especially when the lives are seen as separate from our own. The traffic problem we have is not just that people are jerks or that people are absolute idiots who do not know or have no regard for the rules of the road. This, too, may be true. It is also that people feel lost and powerless, that people have no regard for other people’s lives, and that people have little focus on the longterm.

There is no quick fix for the problems we have allowed to fester. We have years of work to do. We need to find the cause of the hopelessness, lack of control, and anger that people feel. We need to help them to identify these feelings and to manage them in healthy ways. We have to find ways to build community and shared sense of responsibility for our collective wellbeing. This is a role for families, schools, faith-based organisations, and government entities to play. We did not get here overnight, and there is no quick and easy way out of it. Conversations, social protection, civic education, conflict management, and community programming are all a part of the solution, and this requires investment. The question is, as always, what is the longterm transformation worth to the government and the private sector which have the means to invest and innovate?

Published in The Tribune on September 11, 2024.