Training cars are increasingly confronted with aggression, I hear on my car radio. The sun is just rising, big and orange. It is not busy on the road yet. Tailgating, cutting off, honking, and even the brake checkwhere a driver brakes hard, so that you also have to apply the brakes yourself – driving instructors see it more and more often.
Imagine something like that happening during one of your first driving lessons. I can still remember how exciting I found that. With sweaty hands I held the wheel at ten to two. I would have been completely shocked if something like this had happened to me.
Who does that now, being aggressive against training cars? The question in my head echoes on the radio, and the answer is unclear. Increased traffic on the road, everyone is in a hurry and therefore less and less patient, it is said. Young people who have driving lessons are presented with incidents as a learning opportunity: dealing with aggression has inadvertently been added to the curriculum for obtaining a driver’s license.
I look at the sun, which now rises above the horizon like a hemisphere. If only I had been on the bike now, and not yesterday morning. Then there was nothing to see. Everything was completely covered in fog while I cycled along the IJssel. The small droplets that appeared on my gloves and eyelashes became larger and larger, every now and then one would come loose and a misty tear would roll down my cheek.
It was just as quiet as it can be with fog. If you can’t see the vastness, you can feel it: the world was small and big at the same time. Just before Deventer the fog turned gold, and suddenly I was driving in the sun. The last shreds around my wheels and above the river dissolved, the sight of the old city on the other side of the water was enchanting.
People who misbehave should perhaps take an aggressiveness course at the Central Driving License Office, the radio suggests. Is an aggressiveness course the right solution, I wonder as I approach my destination, a conference in Den Bosch. If the reason for aggression is stress, people may need something else. De-stressing, instead of sitting indoors in a room.
I de-stress on the bike. That has been proven to be beneficial. After just half an hour in nature, cortisol, the stress hormone, in your body drops significantly. Your blood pressure drops and your mental fatigue can improve by up to 40 percent through contact with nature. According to the biophilia hypothesis, this applies not only to me, but to everyone. Because humans are evolutionarily attuned to nature, our nervous system relaxes there. Exercise further enhances that effect.
Climate expert Tim van Hattum from Wageningen University will speak at the conference in Den Bosch. He says that of all the inhabitants of the world, the Dutch have the least contact with nature. Wow, I guess – I didn’t know that. It shocks me, and it’s enlightening. The stress in our society, the short fuse: it has many reasons, but this is certainly one of them.
I don’t know where the CBR stands on this, but I would say: don’t give aggressive drivers a course and instead send them into nature. Let them walk, cycle or jog in the woods. That seems like a gift instead of a punishment, I know. But what if that is the solution?
Marijn de Vries is a former professional cyclist and journalist.
