Like many big cities in America, Atlanta is surrounded by a circular
highway that connects with various freeway arteries that go through the
downtown area. Weekday mornings and early evenings, no matter which
highway you're on, or what direction you're going, you'll likely end up
stuck in some hot traffic hell.
Dana Jones, 26, used to drive
from the south end of the city by the airport to a northern suburb at
peak commuting times, right through the daily mess.
"There were
so many people out," Jones says. "You get road rage because nobody will
let you in; nobody will merge right. It's just aggravating."
Despite
the perils of a long commute, most people in the United States drive to
work, according to the American Community Survey (PDF). In fact, more
than 75% of Americans make the trek to work alone.
The stress of
waiting in gridlock can get intense if you're in a hurry, leaving you
feeling frustrated and anxious about the traffic. That stress can
translate into deeper health hazards. Try to distract yourself with your
smartphone, and you can put yourself and other drivers in even more
danger.
Road rage: An 'emotional spin cycle'
LeeAnne
Minnick was sitting in gridlocked traffic, waiting to get on an
on-ramp, in a line of cars that had pulled over to let an ambulance
pass. Suddenly, another driver darted out behind Minnick to tail the
ambulance, taking advantage of the cars that had been moved, to enter
the freeway.
"That incensed me," says Minnick, who makes a
lengthy commute from Athens, Georgia, to Atlanta -- about a 70-mile trip
-- three days a week. "I immediately flew into a rage over it."
That
happened a couple months ago, and Minnick still sounds irritated when
she describes it. She doesn't act aggressively toward other drivers, but
she does get bothered by disrespectful behavior on the road.
It's
easy to get lost in a cycle of emotions where you're talking to
yourself and ruminating about traffic situations, says Leon James,
professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and co-author of
"Road Rage and Aggressive Driving."
"Impatience, if you don't handle it at the beginning, tends to turn into resentment and anger," James says.
The
back seat of the car is what James calls the "road rage nursery." It's
where kids hear their parents cursing out other drivers and expressing
their disbelief about everyone else's poor skills on the road. Children
learn the culture of aggressive driving in this way, he says.
"We use it as an opportunity to disrespect everything and say bad words that we would be shocked to say in any other place."
Another
problem is that after a bad commute, people tend not to let it go,
James says. They walk into the office and complain about their
experiences, which leads to entire conversations about bad traffic and
bad drivers. This venting may feel good in the moment, but it reinforces
the emotions for the next driving trip, he says.
James' solution:
Monitor your traffic emotions. You might try keeping a diary of how you
feel every day after your commute, or just keep a mental note about
your state of mind. What are your negative thoughts while on the road?
Are they justified?
Confronting your internal dialogue about
commuting frustrations may help. You may realize that your negative
thoughts may not be proportional to the offenses you perceive from other
drivers.
James recommends asking yourself: "Am I the kind of
person who thinks these things about people?" and "Is this the kind of
person I want to be?"
Stress: When driving kills slowly
Traffic
situations may trigger in us primal instincts that evolved in humans to
promote survival, so that we can protect ourselves against threats,
experts say.
The "aggressive, combative, competitive frame for
driving" may be linked to our evolutionary past, but it could have
implications for cardiovascular disease, says David Strayer, a
psychology professor at the University of Utah.
In one experiment,
Strayer and colleagues ran a simulation where people drove under the
assumption that they were late to a meeting, and there was a financial
incentive to get there before other people. One group drove in
high-density traffic, another had an easier traffic environment. Some
people were told there was a time limit.
Men more then women got
into aggressive driving mode, showing an elevated blood pressure when
under pressure to weave their way through heavy traffic. In general,
both men and women who adopt an aggressive driving persona seem to show
this, Strayer says.
"In the simulator studies we've done, they'll
actually start driving by cars and flipping them off and honking at
them," Strayer says. "That's just a computer, a computer rendition!"
Long-term
stress increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, he says. Research
on the precise level of cardiovascular risk is limited, but recent data
doesn't paint a flattering picture for the vehicular commuter.
A
2012 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the
farther people commute by vehicle, the higher their blood pressure and
body mass index is likely to be. Also, the farther the commute, the less
physical activity the person was likely to get.
Experts recommend
making the extra effort to avoid peak driving hours. You may even end
up getting home at the same time as if you had left earlier.
"Maybe
it is better off to say, 'I'm going to put the radio on a station
that's nice, and kind of chill out for the 30 or 40 minutes, rather than
aggressively try to get home and beat everyone else,'" Strayer says.
Distractions: When driving kills quickly
People
get bored while driving for a long time. They want something else going
on while they're just looking at cars crawling around them. But some
forms of entertainment are far more dangerous than others.
Strayer
and colleagues used a driving simulator to look at just how distracting
technology can be in the car. A 2008 study from his group, published in
the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, found that people made
more errors driving while talking on a cell phone than while chatting
with another passenger.
The impact of those errors is more than
you might imagine. The researchers showed in a 2006 study (PDF) that
talking on a cell phone, in terms of how it impairs driving, is
comparable to a blood alcohol level of .08, which is the legal limit in
the United States.
About one in three fatalities on the road can
be linked to some kind of distraction; some estimates put this figure
even higher, Strayer says.
Distractions in your car can slow
everyone else down, too, Strayer says. Computer modeling shows that if
one car is not keeping up with the flow of traffic, the number of
vehicles per lane, per hour, declines as more drivers are distracted.
That can add precious minutes onto the commute you're complaining is too
long anyway.
We all know that texting while driving is risky.
But even hands-free, voice-activated interaction with phones can be
distracting, Strayer says. Some conversations are not mundane -- you may
find yourself in a heated argument or in the middle of a breakup talk
(not to mention a breakup text).
What are the precise demands on
your brain with voice-activated systems and what are the consequences of
that? Bryan Reimer, research scientist at the MIT AgeLab and associate
director of the New England University Transportation Center, is looking
into this question.
Reimer is working with Toyota's
Collaborative Safety Research Center to study the visual and nonvisual
demands of your attention while driving. Results should be out sometime
next year.
"If you feel anxiety and your phone goes off, that's a
problem," Strayer says. With all of the notifications barraging our
smartphones from e-mail, text, social media and calendars, "It's a
little unclear what long-term consequences of that are."
Changing your commute?
After several years, the daily drive to and from work in high-traffic areas can really get under some people's skin.
"It
was something that was taking an enormous toll on my overall happiness,
on my ability to deal with stress, on the amount of free time that I
had," says Micah Puett, who used to live in Atlanta and worked for
Turner Broadcasting in the 1990s.
It wasn't until Puett moved to
Denver and found himself in a similarly perilous commuting situation
that he realized how much the driving was affecting him. He made a bold
choice: centralizing where he lives and works.
Puett now lives in
a more urban neighborhood of Denver, where he can walk and bike around.
In the warmer months, he'll ride a motor scooter, and two weeks might
pass without him using a car. Since he is a contractor, Puett can be
selective about which companies he works for based on travel time.
(He'll accept longer commutes if they're short-term commitments.)
"Having
lived the way I live now, you couldn't pay me enough for me to live out
in the suburbs, or live anywhere, and commit to a 45-minute or hour long
commute every day," he says. "There's no amount of money that I would
accept to do that."
But there are plenty of people who don't -- or
can't -- draw that line. Ramona Patrick is the principal of an
elementary school and drives 55 miles through Los Angeles to get to work
Monday through Friday. She'll leave later in the evening to avoid
traffic, but "your life is either on the road or at work."
And
Minnick says she loves her job enough to make the trek from Athens three
times a week. Podcasts and audio books help her get through.
"I
would never say that this is fun," she says of her commute. "I feel like
I've done a good job of making it more enjoyable. I'm really good at
knowing what's going to make me happy for two hours."
