Traffic

Not sure if you've been keeping up with news lately, but LA freeways are turning deadly again. There have been at least seven attacks in the last 10 weeks, four of them fatal, the worst outbreak of apparently random freeway shootings in the Los Angeles area since 1987, when five people were killed.

There's an interesting article from the NY Times written by a journalist having spent some time in the SoCal area, where he rightly noticed that drivers are quite polite and attentive on the freeways-especially as compared with New York drivers:

As a friend from Fullerton puts it, you drive politely, without challenging other drivers even implicitly, because "they're packing." No one honks because no one wants a fight. People use their turn signals to say, as innocently as possible: "Changing lanes now! Not cutting in! No disrespect intended!"

In fact the level of aggression here is about on par with that on Toronto highways. Anyone from a small town would be frightened out of their wits, but having spent some time observing traffic through the streets of Montreal and NYC, I'll have to say it's pretty damn tame here in a metro area with more drivers than the population of some European countries.

It's a funny solution to road rage, in the city with the highest percentage of single driver commuters in the world and the most extensive freeway system anywhere. The only thing I can think of as a parallel is the Air Marshal program; you seed just a random number of planes with men with guns, and the number of hijackings dramatically goes down.

Not that I'm advocating anyone to go out and buy a gun, but I for one won't be flipping off anyone who cuts me off on an on-ramp.