It's like the frog and the boiling water. If you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out unscathed. If you put a frog in cold water and turn the heat up, it will stay there and boil to death. The analogy to transportation is that each day the temperature gets hotter as the congestion builds up and you don't perceive it until at some point you get to gridlock. The symptoms are already showing.
Road rage is one dimension of it.
The time lost in traffic is growing steadily. Miles traveled by automobile continue to grow unabated at the same rate roughly since World War II, between 3 and 4 percent a year. A steady, steady growth. But the reality is, it hasn't made a dent in the rate of sprawl or rate of growth of vehicle miles traveled by auto or the worsening trends toward gridlock. After 45 years in this field, I get increasingly frustrated.