Type the words “road rage” into any search engine and the number of cases worldwide is staggering. It is a social phenomenon that seems to have left no country untouched and around the globe the amount of road-rage incidents ending in murder is growing. Recently, Highway 138 in California was closed after workmen widening the road were subjected to death threats and ball-bearing gun shootings.

Respondents to the annual motoring survey by Saga said that they were as afraid of being a victim of road rage as they were of having an accident and, if a report from Drivesafe, an independent road safety organisation, is to be believed, they are right to be worried.

Drivesafe’s Courtesy on the Road report, conducted and analysed by Aston University, threw up the figure that 16 per cent of motorists admit to initiating a road-rage incident, which does not seem a huge amount until you consider that, according to the DVLA, there are 34.5 million driving licences held in the UK and 16 per cent of that is more than 5.5 million.

If my experience a couple of weeks ago is anything to go by, when I became one of the 43 per cent on the receiving end of road rage, some putative licence-holders think that the best form of defence is attack.

Turning right out of a junction at traffic lights, I edged forward because there was a young female learner in a Red Driving School car stranded in the middle of the main road trying to turn right into my road. But because her lights were red, she had decided to wait in the middle of the road. I motioned for her – no hooting, no irritation – to complete the turn because she was way beyond the lights and had blocked the junction. My three-year-old and I did not even break from our singing until she then started giving me nonHighway Code hand signals and a mouthful of abuse.

Fay Goodman, Drivesafe’s founder, believes that education is the key to changing attitudes behind the wheel and that is echoed by David Henry, the managing director of LVG, Red’s parent company. “As a driving school, under no circumstances would we condone that behaviour. It is against all our principles,” he said.

Henry was as surprised as I at the events, given that learners are usually on the receiving end of such behaviour. “They are quite regularly ‘saluted’,” he said. “And people can be quite reckless in their need to pass a learner. There are some saints, though, who wait patiently while a car stalls 18 times in front of them.”

As experienced drivers, we are supposed to give learners time and space to carry out manoeuvres – which is supposed to be for their protection, not ours – but maybe if we extended that courtesy to all road users, our roads would be a safer and less combative place to be.