LancesWorld.com Journal

Well, it has taken 9 years of driving, but I have finally witnessed my first case of serious road rage. I wish I could say that this road rage was simply observed by me from afar, but alas, I am unable to say that. The road rage I write of here was directed directly at me.

This past Sunday I was driving to Stonestown Mall here in San Francisco. Everything was going fine as I was pulling up behind the mall and approaching the parking lot when, all of a sudden, a green car in the left hand lane (of a four lane road - two in each direction) decided to try and swerve around a slow-moving car in front of it. Unfortunately, I was in the right hand lane, directly in the path of the impatient, swerving vehicle. Seeing this green car coming into my lane, I quickly adjusted my own direction to the right and ended up hitting the curb pretty hard to avoid an accident. Naturally, I honked my horn, but the teenage driver and his teenage passenger didn't much seem to care that they had almost caused a serious accident. When we got to the stop sign about 300 feet beyond the near miss, I pulled up along side them and looked over to see the two boys laughing and flipping me off. Needless to say I was pretty upset about this. After all, they are the ones who nearly crashed into me, and then they have the audacity to flip me off as if it was my fault?

Now, my next move was probably a little uncalled for, and certainly helped to provoke what ensued, but just as the teen driver was about to pull away, I nosed my car in front of theirs to prevent them from going through the stop sign. This upset them more than I intended and the driver of the car furiously threw open his door and got out of his car. I wasn't particularly in the mood to get into any type of physical altercation here, so I drove away. Much to my dismay, though, the driver of the green car got back in and proceeded to follow me. Knowing, of course, that I couldn't very well get myself into a situation where I had to sit stopped for long periods of time, I started driving towards the freeway. At one point, I came to a stop sign just before turning onto a fairly main road. I glanced in my rearview mirror just in time to see the driver again throw open his door. But this time he didn't just stand there throwing his arms in the air; rather, he started running full speed towards me. A bit concerned for my car and my safety, I turned the corner quickly, doing everything I could to speed away and lose them while the driver was otherwise occupied. Somehow I had missed it, but the passenger had also gotten out of the car and was trying to chase my car down the street. All the while, cars behind the green car were honking as the car had been abandoned by both passenger and driver who were chasing my car down the street.

I knew that this was my opportunity to lose them - after all, I was already ahead of them in traffic and they still had to return to their car and weave their own way into the traffic that I had already navigated. I drove a few blocks and, confident that I had lost them, I turned onto a small side street that I felt was unlikely to be targeted by the two teens if they were searching me out. My escape was apparently successful as I saw no sign of the teens or their car again.

Now, to be fair, I was a little concerned about this whole thing. It isn't often that people get out of their cars to chase you down. When they do, you know something is seriously wrong and that they likely have only one motive - to make you pay for your insolence. I highly doubt that they were running over to me to offer their most profound and heartfelt apologies for having nearly crashed into my car. If I had made a wrong choice about which way to go, I could easily have found myself trapped waiting for traffic to clear, thereby leaving myself vulnerable to an attack. Thankfully, though, I chose my path wisely and survived the whole ordeal without injury to anything but my anxiety level.