{"id":505,"date":"2015-03-23T08:30:25","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T13:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abuffalobus.kleinmartin.com\/?p=505"},"modified":"2015-03-23T16:42:23","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T21:42:23","slug":"on-the-road-road-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abuffalobus.kleinmartin.com\/?p=505","title":{"rendered":"On The Road – Road Rage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Recently, we’ve had more road-rage<\/a> on our area roads, the latest being this one<\/a>, caught on camera on the NY I-290. \u00a0This might seem tame, a pick-up all but forcing a sedan off the road, then the driver getting out to throw rocks at the leaving sedan, but for our area that’s pretty bad.<\/p>\n

See, a whole lot of the highway system in and around Buffalo was designed in the 1950’s as part of the New York State Thruway System, and at that time, Buffalo had nearly 900,000 people<\/a> in it’s metropolitan area, and was expected to continue to grow. \u00a0These roadways were designed to be forward-thinking, looking toward that expansion, but with the decline of manufacturing and the change in shipping that the Welland Canal<\/a> (in Ontario) made allowing ocean-going ships to bypass Buffalo’s harbor and continue from Lake Ontario straight on to Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes, the population growth was no-where near expected (and for the city itself, a decline), meaning that our roadways are (generally speaking) overbuilt for the traffic they get. \u00a0Our ‘rush hour’ might delay you all of 5 minutes – maybe 30 if there’s a bad accident.<\/p>\n

As a school bus driver, you really have to be good about keeping yourself calm. \u00a0School buses can clog up traffic, being the only vehicles that can stop ALL traffic (that’s right, ambulances, fire trucks, and police emergency vehicles have to stop for a school bus’ red flashing lights), and on narrow, tight streets being wider than cars, their very presence can make a road impassible for other vehicles. \u00a0We got a lot of ‘three lane’ roads (two-lanes of traffic, one of parked cars) that became ‘one-lane’ roads with the parked cars and snowbanks over this winter.<\/p>\n

And over this past year of driving I have had numerous people bitching at me\/my bus when I needed to make a turn onto a street they were on, and I had to wait for them before I could go, or when there was a ‘one-lane’ street where my bus was already moving in the one lane and they had to pull over into the parked cars on their side and wait for my bus to pass, or where I blocked up the road to wait for my 30 seconds at the stop where there was no student out and waiting for the bus. \u00a0And some of these people have cut around me really unsafely, slammed on their brakes in front of my bus, or not moved when a light turned green ahead of me, all while watching for my reactions, (I’m guessing) because they wanted to make sure that they were annoying me as much as I apparently annoyed them.<\/p>\n

But, as a professional driver, you have to let that stuff go. \u00a0You have to recognize that sometimes the safest thing to do is let these idiots have space, and get out their aggression without reacting to their provocations. \u00a0And sometimes it isn’t easy.<\/p>\n

Here are some sites that give advice on how to avoid road rage in yourself and your driving, and also avoiding being the victim of road rage:<\/p>\n