Speeding Makes Mommy Upset

Is it just me, or are drivers in this city getting more and more impatient and reckless?

A few minutes ago I was coming home from a playdate with Declan and Jackson in the van (Well, actually I had driven past our house to hit the Tim Hortons up the road for an after-playdate coffee, but anyway...) and there was a man in a black pickup truck following me up the road.

There are four elementary schools on the street, including the one our eleven-year-old goes to.

In the Gatineau area, one must go no faster than 30KM/hr in school zones between the hours of 7AM and 5PM, Monday-Friday, September through June. All of these rules are posted on every school zone sign so that it is easily read in both official languages. It's not rocket science. You see a school zone, you slow down. You leave the school zone, you speed up again. What's hard about that?

These laws work when people are patient. Unfortunately, the guy in the pickup truck was anything but. He tailgated me through the first cluster of schools as I did 35-40KM (which is technically speeding, but keeping a 6 cylinder van at 30KM is tricky at best when someone is tailgating it). When it came to the fourth and final school on the road (my eldest son's) we were heading uphill, so I let go of the gas to slow down again.

Once I got to 40KM, Pickup Guy decided he had had enough. He passed me on a solid line, going uphill, during the day, on a school day, in a school zone just so that he could get to the red light at the top of the hill, where ironically there sits a police station.

I can't even begin to describe how much red I was seeing by this point. Road rage doesn't overcome me easily, but throw in a stressful couple of days, a teething toddler, a tired preschooler and a man who doesn't care who he endangers as long as he gets to his destination at light speed, and you have a recipe for one angry mother. In a single act of selfishness he put himself and a family at risk, not to mention broke a law set up to protect young children (who were thankfully all safely inside the school).

I admit to being a bit of a jerk myself at this point. I swore (hopefully not loud enough for my kids to hear over the Backyardigans movie playing in the back), flashed my brights and laid on my horn. Obviously this did a lot of nothing, unless you count making me look foolish and out of control. He, in turn, ignored me.

I was secretly hoping he'd also be turning into the Tim Hortons so I could give him a piece of my mind, but in hindsight I'm glad he didn't. I can't be a stay-at-home-vigilante. I can do my part to make the world a safer place, but interventions like that are best left up to the police.

I know some readers may be snickering under their breath, thinking 'Quebec drivers', but I'd have to disagree with that stereotype. I'm in Ottawa regularly and I see just as many careless traffic violations across the bridge as I do here. It's not a Quebec thing, it's a societal problem and we need to start treating the cause and not just the symptom.

People are stressed, families are overworked and overtired. Everybody's in a rush and nobody really knows where they're going. As Ottawa-Gatineau is still growing by leaps and bounds we're going to see a lot more of this. Traffic is getting worse. Some people are so frazzled that their minds don't even process how their actions can have dire consequences. But being late for an appointment is far less devastating than causing someone's death trying to get there on time.

I admit to feeling a little jolt of glee inside every time someone gets ticketed in a school zone, or for doing 150KM on the 417. That feeling is only temporary, however, as I know they'll do it again and again and again. A slap on the wrist doesn't seem to stop them.

Still, I wonder: How do we curb this problem? Is graduated licensing the answer? Stricter penalties? More police surveillance? Better public transit?

I wish I knew. I'm just glad that we're safe at home for another day and I didn't throw a coffee at someone's windshield out of spite. Shame on me for even thinking that!