The spiritual discipline of rerouting road rage

For most of my adulthood, I convinced myself that road rage was a funny, cute trait of mine. I’m generally composed and congenial but I can transform into a fireball if someone cuts me off, or zips in and out of traffic like it’s a game of pinball. “I just get righteous anger when people are risking other people’s lives,” I say. 

I didn’t notice the extent of my road rage until little voices from the car seats behind me started saying things like, “Get going, Buddy,” or “Come on!” It didn’t matter to my kids that we were at a stoplight – we were not moving efficiently, and the goal of driving, as they perceived from all I was demonstrating, was to keep moving, and to do so as quickly as possible. 

Last year, my husband accepted a job that would take our family from the big city of Hamilton, Ontario, to a quiet, rural area. While there is much to miss about city life, one of the things I look forward to is the new pace of life. My husband and I both felt it the first time we arrived in our new home – a small, laid-back town in a province known for its friendliness. People move slower there. They have more time for you. Strangers are eager to strike up conversation. And the roads feel more peaceful. 

“I’m excited for the way it’ll just be less stressful there,” I said to my husband. But it made me wonder, If I’m looking forward to driving more peacefully there, shouldn’t I be trying to cultivate a more peaceful attitude about driving now?

Can we call this ‘flourishing’?

Our roads, particularly in cities (particularly in cities like Hamilton with an abundance of multi-lane, one-way streets that run as highways through the middle of our residentially dense downtown neighbourhoods), function in a way that creates a sense of competition. “The lights on Main are programmed to reward speeding,” a friend of mine pointed out once. Shameful confession: I’ve caught myself pummeling at 80 kilometres an hour through the 50 kilometre zones in the evenings. I was so caught up in the rush of zipping through green light after green light that I didn’t even realize my speed until I looked down at the speedometer. I’ve heard others describe this feeling too, the reward of arriving a couple minutes earlier than Google maps predicts, the glee of getting through an intersection before the light turns yellow. But the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers should always supersede my desire for an efficient driving experience. 

I had the pleasure a few years ago of hearing a city planner talk about how we are called to “seek out the good of the city we are in,” as Jeremiah calls the Israelites to do in the Babylonian captivity. He spoke about ways in which cities have been designed for human flourishing, and ways in which they aren’t. Many of our modern neighbourhoods have been designed in ways that evolve around cars and don’t facilitate walking to get groceries, to visit the community centre or to engage with nature. “Our houses are now designed so that we pull up into our garages and don’t have to ever see our neighbours,” he said. We’ve lost our sense of local community, of connection to each other.

The roads in Hamilton, and in most cities really, are designed to prioritize cars, and in a culture that hustles, where we are all over-scheduled, where we are indoctrinated with messages like “time is money,” it makes sense that every time we get in a vehicle – every time we are isolated in metal boxes and detached from the people and creatures around us – it becomes a video-game experience of getting to the finish with as few inconveniences as possible. Everyone around us becomes an obstacle in our goal of getting to work or school or the gym where we can finally start producing again.

Stop light prayers 

Most of us live in neighbourhoods that are not designed for human flourishing. In Hamilton, downtown businesses suffer from lack of patronization because the streets are too busy to facilitate a comfortable strolling experience. Since Hamilton has begun increasing its bike infrastructure with designated lanes and lights, the city has seen significant decreases in cyclist related accidents. A CBC article from 2013 states that Hamilton, at that time, was the second most dangerous city for pedestrians. Due to improving lights, converting one-way double-lane streets into two-way streets, and other changes to roadways, crash data demonstrates that those numbers are reducing as well. We need to continue to seek the good of the city, and to redesign it accordingly.

“We need to no longer conform to the patterns of these roads,” I told my husband (although I was speaking more so myself), “but transform ourselves by the renewing of our minds.” I said it with a bit of melodrama, but I meant it. On a municipal level, we need to continue to renew our cities and towns in ways that prioritize foot traffic, cycling and transit usage, both for the sake of the planet God has given us and for the sake of those who can’t drive, either due to the cost of owning a vehicle or because of disability. 

And so when my trip had an extra ten minutes added to it because city workers were preparing to create a light-rail transit line through the downtown, I took a deep breath, recognized my annoyance, and remembered that we were moving a step closer to flourishing in this city. I reminded myself that stop lights are an opportunity to slow my breathing, that driving is an opportunity to pray, and that I would rather have to sit a little longer in traffic if it means our city is safer. And hopefully, with time, my outlook on driving will be renewed.