Add a human being to a motorized vehicle and you end up with some form of rage. The Washington Post reports this morning that the newest form of vehicular madness is “off-road rage,” what happens when off road riders meet up with everyone else in the wilderness.

We suspect this is nothing new, that ORV riders and everyone else have been ticked off at each other since the first four-wheeler. (Richard Nixon issued an executive order in 1972 protecting public land from off-road riders.) Now, however, there are 50 million of these buggers zipping about, from Yellowstone to the Hatfield McCoy trails in West Virginia. And confrontations are mounting.

Off-road riders now account for 10 percent of visitors to public lands, and the noise tees off the other 90 percent of visitors. What to do? Nobody knows. The average federal land law officer must patrol 1.5 million acres. And, meanwhile, the tussles between ORV riders and others grow more frequent and violent.

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