The rise in traffic fatalities in the sixties was probably due to the number of baby boomers turning 16 and getting their first drivers license--putting more inexperienced drivers on the road. Most of the charts show a steeper than trend line drop during the seventies when Jimmy Carter imposed the 55 mph speed limit. One wouldn't expect to see any correlation with road rage stories in the newspapers. Such incidents were always rare--amounting to no more than a few percent of all accidents.

Agnostic: road rage is about intentional attacks. The accidental death plot need not show a positive correlation.

Note: I seriously doubt that road rage is a statistically significant phenomenon, but these plots do not demonstrate that. What you would want instead are arrest rates for things like vehicular manslaughter.

I guess I'm using "road rage" in a broader way. Like I said in the post, more like carelessness or recklessness, and/or hostility, as a way to gauge how thoughtful people are of the lives they're affecting.

Do nonfatal crashes follow the same pattern? If they do, it probably means that people were driving badly at that time (more drunk driving?). If nonfatal crashes went down while fatal ones rose, it might be from people driving faster without car safety measures having time to catch up yet.

This is surely due to improvements in automotive design and stricter transportation laws. Since the 1960s we have seen crumple zones, airbags, 3 point harness seatbelts, mandatory seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws, stricter policing of drunk driving laws, and requirements for babyseats. Apparently, even the use of an additional braking light up by the rear window reduces accidents.

I recall the "road rage" fad in the press in the late 1990s well. My opinion at the time, as someone who had been driving since 1975, was that I couldn't see any evidence that there was more road rage now than before. I suspect all that happened was that somebody coined the catchy alliterative term "road rage" to conveniently describe a phenomenon which had been around since shortly after the beginning of motoring, and so the media went crazy over it for awhile.

It's kind of like the media fad early in this decade when somebody coined the term "jump the shark" -- it didn't mean that television shows were jumping the shark more or less than before. We just now had a term to describe it conveniently. (And, I must say, "road rage" is a much better phrase than "jump the shark").

Before that, the catchphrase was "highway machismo," if I remember.

Razib wrote

I located, collected, analyzed, and wrote up all of the relevant data -- stretching back nearly 60 years -- in less than one day, and only using the internet and Excel. This shows us again that journalists are either too clueless, too lazy, or too stupid to figure anything out.

A year ago I'd have agreed. However, in the context of following the Freshwater affair in Ohio (search Panda's Thumb on "Freshwater" for details), it appears to me that a contributing factor is the time pressure on reporters. Newspapers have laid off significant numbers of news reporters, and those remaining have to generate the same content with fewer hours. I watch reporters at that hearing filing stories on one topic they covered the evening before via wireless while trying to take notes on the hearing so they can file a story on it that same day. As far as I can see, they don't have the leisure to spend a day massaging data even if they had the skills (which, I concede, many don't).

that's not me RHB, it's assman.

Oops. Sorry.