Columnist Susan Snyder: Driven to brink of rage

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 9:08 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

There were shades of AA in this week's AAA aggressive driving seminar.

"I am an aggressive driver," Metro Police Det. Bill Redfairn confessed to a group of public safety officials Wednesday.

They gathered at UNLV to hear results of an aggressive driving survey the automobile association conducted in Clark County in October.

"At least a dozen times a day I say, 'Let's move it, park it or build a garage around it,' " said Redfairn, who heads up Metro's fatal crash investigation team. "I didn't realize I was an aggressive driver."

Judging by the survey results, most of us don't realize the first aggressive driver we encounter each day likely looks back from the mirror.

On the way to Wednesday's seminar the chick in my mirror darted around two stopped CAT buses and cursed the idiocy of thoughtless drivers who crash on Desert Inn where that stupid construction at Paradise Road clogs traffic.

She mentally thumbed her nose at the totally selfish jerk who drove past the whole line and figured someone would be a sport and let him merge where the orange barrels narrowed the traffic lane.

"Fat chance Professor Road Hog! Rot in traffic purgatory!" she thought as she inched past him.

Hey, I'm not aggressive when I'm right, right?

Wrong. Not letting in some totally selfish jerk is just as aggressive. And aggression -- not road rage -- is the issue. Aggressive driving is exceeding the speed limit, weaving in and out, following too closely or tearing around stopped buses.

Road rage is a criminal offense in which anger rises to a point of aggression or violence against another person. Aggressive driving can escalate to road rage, or it can remain self-contained -- inside your car.

"People don't see themselves as the problem, and I think that's human nature," said Erin Breen, of the Safe Communities Partnership. "We are the aggressive drivers."

What the survey shows best is what we completely fail to see in ourselves.

For instance, 66 percent of the drivers surveyed said aggressive driving behavior doesn't include being distracted by talking on cell phones, messing with kids, eating and other activities. But 48 percent want police officers to ticket all the morons who do that stuff (but don't do it as well as we do).

More than half want police to bust drivers who speed, but 74 percent of us don't want any speed limits reduced.

And the roads local motorists perceived to have the most aggressive drivers are the freeways on which we expect to travel the fastest.

Maybe if we used freeways for getting out of town, rather than getting around town, we would expect to travel at 35 mph and expect the traffic environment to include stoplights, buses, pedestrians and bicyclists.

We'd have to give up the long work commutes. But maybe more of us could get to work without adding cars to the road and fewer would expect high-speed, unobstructed travel in an urban environment.

"Nevada is becoming an urbanized state, Steve Guderian, of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said. "The traffic safety wolf is at the door."

Ha! Not my door. Must be yours.