Ask A Genius 1157: You Can’t Have Road Rage If You Don’t Drive
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/11
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, in an article in Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society years ago, you wrote an article about road rage. Do you still have it? Why is it more? Why is it less?
Rick Rosner: It’s mostly less because I’m older, and not necessarily wiser, but people’s driving has overall gotten so shitty that you can’t be mad at everybody all the time. I read that traffic accidents are up 15%, with the theory being that COVID has affected everybody’s brain, making us angrier and destroying spatial perception, if any of that is accurate. But yes, since I wrote that article almost 20 years ago, people’s driving has gotten a lot worse.
Also, I don’t drive as much anymore. I picked up Carole at the airport, but that’s a rare long trip for me—25 miles to the airport.
Jacobsen: How’s traffic?
Rosner: Not bad until a quarter mile from the airport. Then LAX—well, they keep trying to fix it to get people in and out of there, and maybe someday they will, but it’s not fixed yet. They’ve spent probably $1 billion upgrading the traffic flow in and out of there, and it’s still messed up. Maybe it’s the design of the area—it’s in the middle of a city. There’s an IHOP a block away, and Sepulveda Boulevard is right there. Modern airports seem to be designed for flow, away from the heart of the city. They shut down Denver’s Stapleton Airport 20 years ago and built a new one 20 miles out of town. It was probably part of some corrupt land deal.
But you can get in and out of the new Denver airport. I’ve never seen a traffic jam there. Though, what you save in time by missing traffic jams, you end up wasting on driving 15 to 20 miles to it and another 15-20 miles away from it. But yes, I assume it’s an outmoded design from the 60s that makes LAX such a pain in the ass to get in and out of.
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