Britain has a road rage problem. Stalking and death threats are the new normal

Yahoo

01-05-2025

It's a beautiful, balmy day in early April, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. And yet my body is tense, my temper short and my blood pressure high. The reason? I've got to get in my car – again – and navigate the narrow, traffic-choked, infinitely infuriating road system in York, where I live.
It's only 9.30am, but I've already spent more than an hour behind the wheel today, doing the school run. Later this afternoon, I will do it again in reverse. On an average day I spend approximately three hours driving, despite living in a city that's just under four miles across. And it's these endless, repetitive, distance-short but time-consuming journeys that drive me to distraction. Give me a motorway and four hours to get somewhere and I'll be zen. Stick me in a traffic jam when I'm a mere half a mile from my destination and I start to simmer. Throw in a pair of grumpy kids and a dog who hates being in the car and I – shamefully often – hit boiling point.
But, I'm not alone. Britain has a road rage problem, and right now it's bubbling over. A Freedom of Information request of UK police forces by The Telegraph found that the number of overall crimes featuring 'road rage' or 'aggressive driving' in the crime report has increased by over a third (34 per cent) between 2021 and 2024, cited in reports ranging from criminal damage and theft to stalking, harassment and threats to kill.
In the last few months alone, there have been multiple stories of uncontained anger and desperate police appeals for witnesses: a man threatened with a crowbar in a road rage incident in Weymouth; a fist fight between a car and motorbike driver in Jersey; a BMW driver who received an 18-month driving ban in January after driving aggressively behind a coach carrying 80 children in Essex; a couple threatened with a knife outside McDonald's in Plymouth after they were blocked by an aggressive van driver. In February, the journalist Sarah Vine tweeted a Porsche driver's numberplate to her 58,000 followers after he tailgated her, then rammed into the back of her car when she was driving her daughter through south-west London, having seemingly taken umbrage at Vine stopping to let a pedestrian cross the road.
I had a similar experience in leafy Windsor the same month – pulling over to ask someone for directions, I was hooted at angrily by a Subaru estate driving behind me that swerved aggressively in my direction before pulling away. The car was adorned with Trump 2024 and 'Stuck Farmer' stickers – although statistics do not reveal whether Right-wing/Republican voters suffer more rage on the roads than their Left-wing counterparts. In my own home city of York, meanwhile, North Yorkshire police are currently investigating an Audi driver who got out of his car and punched the window of a Renault on the seventh circle of hell, aka the outer ring road, at 8.30am on a Wednesday in the middle of March. Having spent many fruitless hours on that same road, I can almost sympathise.
It's hard not to conclude that our highways and byways are becoming angrier – and potentially more dangerous – places to be. But perhaps that's not surprising. Car traffic on Britain's roads increased to 251.3 billion vehicle miles in 2023 (the latest year for which official figures are available), and some 60 per cent of journeys taken are by car. Despite this, the average speed at which you can travel has been steadily decreasing: in Liverpool, for example, it takes 50 seconds more to travel 10km than it did this time last year; in Manchester and Nottingham you can add 40 seconds on to your 10km travel time, according to TomTom's most recent traffic index.
Throw in the imposition of 20mph speed limits in city centres; low traffic neighbourhoods, where cars are prohibited from taking certain routes; smart motorways and average speed checks taking motorway limits down to as low as 50mph; potholes galore and steadily rising prices at the pumps and it's not surprising that motorists feel the system is stacked against them – even if they're no petrolhead, just someone who needs to get from A to B as quickly and conveniently as possible. And when the chips are down and you feel as if you're on the losing end, well, you get angry. With, clearly, some fairly drastic outcomes.
Road rage, observe the neuroscience professor Johan Bjureberg and psychologist James J Gross in their 2021 academic study on regulating it, has been a problem since the advent of cars. Whether you define it as any sort of hostile behaviour directed at other road users, or only the most serious forms of aggression, driving anger is reliably associated with traffic crashes. And there are reliable triggers: slow drivers (who drive me insane), hostility of other drivers, time urgency (again, often an issue for me) and yes, daily stressful events, as well as traffic congestion.
My own rage, I realise when I stop to think about it, comes less from the external factors of driving – the roads; the other drivers – and more the internal, or more specifically, the immediate proximity of certain figures, otherwise known as my children, and also pets. I don't get enraged by what's going on outside the car, I get enraged by what's going on inside it – which in turn makes me more susceptible to irritation at other drivers, and consequentially dangerous driving.
I haven't ever punched a car or another driver, but I've definitely lashed out at my kids when they've been fighting in the back, turning round to aim a wild slap at the nearest knee. I've also screamed at them, yelled at the dog and on one particularly frustrating morning, when the council appeared to be digging up almost every road into the city, kicked everyone out of the car, locked the doors and made them run along the pavement while I crawled through the slow-moving queue trying to calm myself down (I let them back in eventually).
This sort of reaction, says Ray Coates, is not unusual. 'Sometimes it just comes out,' he reassures me. Coates, a mild-mannered, dapper man in his 50s, has come to take me through a two-and-a-half hour road-rage course that aims to help drivers confront their issues and deal with them. A trained coach and mentor, former driving instructor and a singer-songwriter in his spare time, Coates looks as if he's never lost his temper in his life. But then he tells me he has five children, and used to often drive them all to school – and sometimes their friends too. This man has clearly been through fire.
Drivers Domain, the organisation that Coates works for, started offering road-rage courses about eight years ago, after publishing a blog on the topic and seeing a surge in enquiries for training. Take-up is not as high as it might usefully be – Rob Morgan, the company's founder says they only do 10 to 12 sessions a month at most. The biggest demand comes from the south-east, especially London, and the majority of people doing the course are men, at a roughly 80:20 split, although, says Morgan, 'they don't always say, but often they are forced to do it'. As an example, he cites the case of a recent client whose wife had told him he was scaring her behind the wheel, and he had to do something about it. 'We're not mental health professionals,' adds Morgan. 'But the basis of the course is to get people to self reflect, and to understand the causes of their actions.'
The morning that Coates sends me a text to tell me he's outside my door is not a good one. I'm running on six hours' sleep, I've got far too much to do and I'm wired and lightly jittery on too much caffeine. Our 10-year-old Volvo estate – a lumbering but useful workhorse – is also starting to seriously p--- me off. At the decade mark, it has seen various things starting to go wrong, and despite an expensive full service last month, my dashboard has recently started to inform me that my parking sensors aren't working and need attention. Quite when I'm going to attend to them I'm not sure.
Coates sits at my kitchen table with a coffee and runs through some more basic driving psychology with me. Even Roadcraft, the police drivers' handbook, has a section about 'red mist' he tells me. It advises that the key to preventing it descending is to concentrate on the driving task in hand, rather than the incident. 'Don't get into a personality conflict with another road user,' the handbook states. 'Be dispassionate and concentrate on your driving.'
We're going to do an initial analysis drive where I can talk about how driving makes me feel, Coates explains; then we'll come up with some solutions. I have to pick three recent incidents where I felt the red mist descend. I tell him about the time I was so furious at my kids for making us late that I shouted at them for half the journey to school. The drive last weekend where the dog whined so incessantly I couldn't look at the road in front properly and had to stop the car and illegally put her in the back with my eight-year-old, otherwise I would either have run myself off the road or deliberately run her over. The afternoon where, having decided to be nice and pick my 11-year-old up from school rather than making him get the bus, I got there faster than I'd anticipated and ended up trying to find him somewhere en route for 20 minutes (he'd started to walk to meet me as instructed), sending me into such a boiling rage that I absolutely lost it at him when he finally got in the car.
Reflecting on both my feelings and how I displayed them outwardly at all these times makes me feel seriously ashamed. To a detached outsider, I must seem like an insane person – or at the very least, someone with severe anger issues. If, as Coates says, driving is 'like an amplification of certain characteristics of humanity,' should I really be behind the wheel at all?
Congestion in our towns and cities is bad, and it's getting worse. TomTom's annual traffic index puts five British cities in the top 100 of the 500 most congested in the world. In London, drivers take an average of 33 minutes and 22 seconds to travel 10km, losing 113 hours per year to the rush hour. Congestion generally is estimated to cost the economy £30 billion a year.
Coates points out that we have an expectation when we get in a vehicle that it will be convenient – that's why we're driving and not taking the bus, after all. 'You don't tend to think of driving as unreliable,' he says. 'But almost as soon as you leave the drive there are going to be challenges. That's going to be an incredibly difficult repetitive situation to face. So what can we do about that?'
I tell Coates I realise that I've come to actively resent my car. Until we moved to the outskirts of York a couple of years ago we lived in London and rarely used it, except to head out of the city occasionally at weekends. Then, it was a source of freedom. Now it's become something I rely on, not as a means of escape, but as a burden of tedious duty. I am not achieving anything on these journeys, I tell him; the time is not productive for me. I look at cyclists (my previous mode of transport, when my children's school was on our road and I worked in an office every day) and envy them their freedom and the wind blowing in their hair. Also, my car is a hot mess that smells of dog and assorted foodstuffs, and is not a fun place to be. Is it any wonder that I find myself getting snappy and distracted behind the wheel?
One thing Coates says sticks in my mind. 'We tend to think of traffic as everybody else,' he points out. 'But, we are the traffic.' He once deliberately engineered road rage, he tells me. 'I made it happen. I then realised that I was just looking for somebody to vent at.' Easier to do that, perhaps, than confront the realisation that you – as 'the traffic' – may be someone else's problem.
We've decided to retrace the school run I've already done this morning (predictably traffic-free at this point). Chatting away, I realise I'm not completely disliking this drive, although, I tell Coates, I have underlying stress about the amount of work I have to do right now, which feels incompatible with wasting a morning just driving around. He asks about this stress and I tell him it's there most of the time, but that I'm usually quite good at concealing it, it just bubbles away underneath the surface. I am, I tell him, the proverbial duck – outwardly serene; paddling like f--- underneath.
In their academic paper on road rage, Bjureberg and Gross observe that 'it is not the situation per se that elicits the emotion but rather how the situation is viewed'. If we can notice our mounting tension, choose to change how we think about our situation in the light of the ultimate goal (getting my children to school on time and in one piece) and remind ourselves that we're not the only ones on the road, we can hopefully calm down.
Coates's advice essentially boils down to the same thing. If I can try and notice what I'm feeling first, rather than pretending everything is OK and pushing it all down, only for it to explode later, it will help to dissipate my rage. He also suggests I make use of my compartmentalising ability while I'm in the car – after all, when you're in it, there's nothing you can do except, well, be in it.
I admit to him that getting angry in the car doesn't serve anyone – especially not me. In fact, it makes things actively worse – the more wound up I get, the more I shout. Again, something backed up by academia: Bjureberg and Gross note that short-term venting strategies – shouting and swearing, for example – generally only lead to more aggressive behaviour in the future.
When, a couple of days after my driving course, my report from Coates arrives, I am nervous. After all, I basically revealed all my most psychotic tendencies to a virtual stranger who knows exactly how dangerous those tendencies can be when someone is in charge of a couple of tonnes of metal.
But what is most surprising about the report is what he managed to pick up on between the lines. As we were driving along, Coates asked me about positive memories of being in the car. I'd remembered my dad taking me to school, on the very same roads that I now wrestle with daily, and how that time – although often traffic-choked and frustrating – was also precious daily time with him. We entertained ourselves by looking out for the same people every day: the young man we christened 'The Bouncing Boy' because of his springy gait; the lady with the mad hair that looked like a wig.
I realise I've subconsciously done the same thing with my own children – looking out for familiar spots each day – and that however frustrating and time-wasting I find our daily journeys, when I stop to think about it, I do value the time we have together in the car. It's a space to chat, prepare for the day ahead, listen to any worries or concerns – and one that I am increasingly aware, as my children grow up, is a place and space that won't last for ever. Coates's advice is that I build on this, focusing not on the frustration, but taking a 'legacy' approach that can help me build positive memories in the car with my kids.
He also made me realise that ultimately, although right now driving pisses me off, I'm also grateful I can do it. The flip side of the tedium of my car is the freedom it brings; I can't imagine being totally reliant on public transport, or worse, someone else, to get to where I want to go.
Perhaps this is the key to all of our 21st-century, selfish, entitled rage on the roads: realising that we can get to where we want to go under our own steam. Our cars might not bring ultimate freedom any longer, but for most of us, it's still a damn sight better than the alternative.
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