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Cabbie road rage in Montreal not only incident in recent years

Montreal taxi driver charged after hitting passengers with cab

A Montreal cab driver is facing a charge of assault with a weapon after allegedly trying to run down two passengers who refused to pay a fare. An 18-year-old man endured head wounds and a 20-year-old man was treated in hospital for less serious injuries on Monday. The 32-year-old driver faces seven criminal offences.

It’s latest in a slew of road rage incidents over the years that involve cab drivers across the country.

June 2015: A cab driver goes on a racist, profanity-riddled tirade after refusing to move from a parking spot outside a building that was expecting an ambulance. In a video that was posted to YouTube, a security officer and several others are subjected to an onslaught of expletives after telling the driver he needs to move his car. The driver’s taxi licence was suspended.

October 2012: A former Toronto cabbie is sentenced to two years less a day for mangling the leg of a cyclist during a heated dispute. Sultan Ahmed reversed his taxi into Krzysztof Kastelewicz’s bike after they squared off on a city street. The judge in the hearing said that the victim in the incident was not blameless but likely would have died if a neighbour hadn’t heard his screams.

Leon James is a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and has studied road rage and aggressive driving for 20 years. He says drivers tend to talk to themselves about other drivers, so when something happens, it triggers a reaction.

“A cab driver who is confronting other drivers all day long might be more challenged than other people, in respect of talking to themselves about other drivers in a negative way,” he tells Yahoo Canada News. “If you do a lot of ruminating behind the wheel, you’re at risk of losing emotional control if something happens.”

Monitoring your thoughts is one way to deal with preventing potential outbursts on the road.

“If you find your thoughts are negative, you need to talk to yourself about changing your attitude,” he says.

Marc Andre Way, president of Canadian Taxi Association (CTA), says there’s a rigorous screening process for taxi drivers in most cities. In Ottawa, for example, new drivers must go through an eight-week course and provide a criminal background check, among other things, before getting their taxi licence.

“Most cities have similar versions of the process,” he says. “One of the CTA’s mandate is to standardize these issues throughout the nation.”

He stresses that serious incidents of road rage involving taxi drivers are “dealt with very quickly.”