No road safe from rage of LV drivers

Scott Dickensheets

Monday, Oct. 20, 1997 | 9:47 a.m.

Road rage is a growing -- HEY, BUY AN ENGINE, GRANNY! ... On the streets of Las Vegas, road rage is a growing prob -- THAT EIGHT-SIDED RED THING IS A STOP SIGN, STUPID! ... Road rage is -- LEARN TO DRIVE, YOU (string of unprintable expletives) ...

Anyway, as we were saying before that idiot in the bronze Infiniti cut us off, road rage is a growing problem in Las Vegas. That's less a statement of statistical certainty -- neither Metro Police nor the Nevada Highway Patrol tracks road rage incidents as a separate category -- than a general feeling on the streets.

Who among us hasn't been swerved in front of, followed too closely, had various combinations of digits waved at us by angry motorists? Often all in a single commute. Offensive, not defensive, driving is the rule. It's practically Pavlovian: See the turn signal, instinctively zoom ahead to prevent the other car's lane change.

"Just the other day," says NHP spokesman Steve Harney, "two kids were going back and forth (on U.S. 95) across three lanes, cutting each other off." Troopers caught those two, but countless other wacko motorists get away.

There are actually two types of behavior here: aggressive driving -- the cutting, weaving and speeding -- and actual road rage -- the chasing, ramming and shooting. They are, naturally, inextricably linked, the former giving rise to the latter more and more often. Metro traffic officials tell of an increase in the number of drivers at accident scenes who are agitated beyond what's typical in such situations, drivers who seem "frustrated by everything."

"These high-risk drivers climb into the anonymity of an automobile and take their frustration out on anybody at any time," warns a Metro fact sheet on the issue.

While Southern Nevada certainly hasn't turned into the Southern California of our imaginations -- a gantlet of vehicular fear, every commute a running gun battle -- you don't have to seek out aggressive-driving incidents. Just hold still for a minute; they'll come to you.

"Just the other day I was at a gas station, getting gas," Harney says, "and this car pulled up in the right-hand lane. It was a red light. Another car pulls up behind it. When the light turned green, the vehicle in front makes a right-hand turn. The second vehicle speeds up around him, gets in front of him and slams on his brakes. The first guy ran into him."

Asked by Harney, the second driver said he was angry that the first didn't simply turn right against the red. "I'm running late!" he howled. Yet his need to make time didn't outweigh his hunger for traffic vengeance.

Perhaps the most notable local road rage incident was the 1994 shooting of Melynda Aulicino, the girlfriend of District Judge Donald Mosley, after a traffic squabble that began on U.S. 95.

"These things happen," Harney says. Indeed. In August, two men in a Ford Bronco allegedly pursued a motorcyclist down Cheyenne Avenue and Pecos Road after a traffic dispute, shooting him in the back before crashing the Bronco.

It is, of course, a nationwide phenomenon, having made the jump from taken-for-granted reality to trend-noting cover story in U.S. News and World Report. If stats are sketchy at the local level, they're clearer nationally. A study released this summer by the American Automobile Association concludes that aggressive driving incidents are up 51 percent since 1990.

Just last week, a North Carolina driver's ed instructor ordered the student he was teaching to chase down a vehicle that had just cut them off; the instructor then whacked the offending driver on the nose. In Virginia, a lane-change disagreement led to a high-speed chase that killed two innocent drivers. In Denver, the problem has worsened enough to prompt an unprecedented seven-agency crackdown on speeders, weavers, lane-changers and tailgaters.

"As the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has seen a rise in this type of driving behavior, so have we," says Metro's John Thornton, a lieutenant in the traffic division. Despite all the fresh ink, he says it's not really a new problem. "To me, it's been on the rise for years."

Everyone knows why road rage is welling -- there are more people on the road to be enraged by. Those thousands of new residents aren't arriving by boat. Couple the influx of cars with a concurrent increase in highway construction and it's perhaps not surprising that the guy in that white Ford Escort cavalierly usurps your right of way, not seeming to care that you had to slam on your brakes to avoid hitting him.

In fact, this being the independent-minded, up-yours Wild West, many people cultivate a certain cowboy pride in their combative driving. That element of incivility makes aggressive drivers even more infuriating.

"We're taught as children to wait in line," Thornton says. "You get in line and wait your turn. And in driver's ed we learn to keep so many car lengths between you and the next car. So you're waiting in line and this guy cuts in front of you. It's frustrating."

Lightly used public transportation probably adds to the problem, as does the popularity of trucks and sport-utility vehicles, which some experts say give drivers a sense of isolation from traffic, a feeling of invincibility.

Other possible factors:

* Time lag: We live in a largely instantaneous society -- fast food, speedy communications -- yet driving often requires a teeth-grinding slowdown. "I can remember when you could get on Sahara and go from one end of the valley to the other in 15 minutes," Harney says. No longer.

* Technological malaise: The auto is one of the few machines we can still control, and it's frustrating to have that control interfered with by an inattentive soccer mom in a green minivan.

* A vehicular Jekyll and Hyde dynamic: There is a famous Disney short in which mild-mannered Goofy climbs into his car and without warning becomes a lane-changing, horn-honking, obnoxious maniac. "You say people don't do that," Harney says. "Well, they do."

The real problem, ultimately, is that we humans take things personally. It's our nature. We are unable to shrug off someone else's ill-advised lane change with a blithe These things happen. So, when that complete moron guns his primer-spotted El Camino in front of us, we take it as a personal affront. In reality, of course, he doesn't know us or understand just how important it is for us to achieve our destination unimpeded by morons in El Caminos, but it feels like he's singled us out for special mistreatment. And he's not going to get away with it!

What we feel right then is an instructive impulse gone haywire: We'll teach that guy! "Taking things personally is one thing we just shouldn't do," Harney says. "We have to realize that maybe he's a jerk, but then let it slide by." Keep your cool. Don't make eye contact. Don't wave any provocative combination of digits. Resist the urge to give chase. Otherwise ... "Somebody flips somebody off, and, you know, 'You can't flip me off,' and he shoots him."

Of course, the increasingly real threat of being shot at has undoubtedly deterred more than one incipient road rage incident.

A final note: All the vehicle descriptions in this story -- bronze Infiniti, soccer mom in a green minivan -- were drawn from incidents experienced -- WHY DON'T YOU LEARN TO DRIVE, JERK! ... experienced by this reporter in the course of assembling this story.

archive