Bad drivers run risk of having their plate numbers exposed to the world
Misty Harris
Sun
With city streets looking more like a bumper-car rally every day, websites allowing motorists to unleash their rage are popping up faster than middle fingers on the freeway.
Among the most popular is platewire.com, a fast-growing site on which the road weary can air grievances — not to mention the plate numbers of offending drivers — for the world to see.
“It’s a useful tool for people who are fed up with being put in danger just from driving back and forth to work,” says Mark Buckman, who co-created platewire with his brother after the pair narrowly escaped five separate collisions during a single commute.
“It seems like the only time people pay attention to their driving is when there’s a police officer behind them.”
Although currently geared to American motorists, the site’s venting forum will soon be opened to those in Canada, Mexico and Europe in an effort to expose bad drivers of all nationalities. Buckman’s vision is to use public humiliation to get people to clean up their act.
Recent posts include a motorist who was run off the road by another driver, causing $1,000 in damages; someone who witnessed a driver who “ran over a little kid at a crosswalk and drove away;” a pedestrian who was hit by a “maniac in an Audi” while crossing the street; and a bedazzled driver who complains that a fellow motorist’s rims were “so bright and shiny that the glare nearly made me run off the road.”
Buckman has yet to be contacted by police about the criminal activities reported on platewire, save for one officer he claims warned him “the authorities should be left to take care of this stuff.”
Michael Marsden, a noted expert on car culture, believes sites of this kind (among them, aboveaveragedriver.com, monkeymeter.com and baddriving.com) could be helpful in taking road rage off-road.
“If we believe in ultimate automotive freedom, which we do, then those [motorists] who are attacking us aren’t just criminals, they’re downright unpatriotic,” says Marsden, dean of St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. His only concern is that some people might use the information on the sites to exercise a kind of vigilante justice.
“It’s almost like America’s Most Wanted,” says Marsden. “Posting information about a criminal and hoping other people will find him.”
Off-road raging in the newspaper is also proving popular, with publications such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Edmonton Journal maintaining reader-generated columns designed for letting off steam.
“People tell me the act of writing or phoning is cathartic, that they feel better even if their vent never gets published,” says Terry McConnell, whose Venting feature in the Journal attracts more than 300 submissions a week — about one in five of which are related to traffic.
Christopher White, spokesman for the Traffic Safety division of the Canadian Automobile Association, believes motorists would do better to focus on the task at hand — getting to their destination in one piece — than documenting the activities of fellow drivers.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006