Mean streets

David Kihara

Sunday, March 19, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.

At least 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization. That's roughly the equivalent of a 9/11 tragedy every day.

Countries across the globe are searching for creative ways to curtail the carnage.

But Sweden starts with a controversial premise: You can't change the way people drive.

Called "Vision Zero," the safety program essentially assumes that drivers are going to make mistakes. So streets and highways are designed to allow those mistakes without causing serious injury.

For example, many intersections have been converted to roundabouts. Instead of regular guard rails, which tend to bounce cars back into traffic, Sweden favors cable rails that can catch and hold a car.

The result of those steps and many others is a strikingly low rate of fatalities and injuries. Last year, 440 people died in traffic accidents in the nation of 9 million people - reportedly the lowest rate of any industrialized nation.

- David Kihara

Raise your hand if you've ever run a red light.

Raise your hand if you've gabbed on a cell phone while driving. If you've gone 20 miles over Las Vegas speed limits, been in a wreck or followed another driver too closely, raise your hand.

Statistics suggest that a lot of you should have hands in the air. The Las Vegas Valley, by most any measurement, is home to a lot of bad drivers.

One example: Traffic deaths caused by drivers running red lights. Nevada's rate was second worst in the nation last year, the Nevada Division of Insurance reported.

Cab and limo drivers, traffic experts and driving instructors - people who are paid to deal with our driving every day, say they find us reckless and aggressive. We drive too fast down narrow streets. On wide ones, we weave through heavy traffic, while putting on makeup, or eating, or dialing the cell phone.

Yellow lights mean speed up.

"We're totally out of control," said John Phillips, the owner instructor of Drive Friendly Driving & Traffic School, who also serves on a recently formed state Transportation Department committee examining traffic fatalities and injuries on the roads.

The result is higher insurance rates and alarmingly high numbers of traffic accidents and fatalities.

In a comparison of 150 American cities, Clark County had the 10th highest rate of fatalities from traffic accidents in 2004 - 16.2 per 100,000 population, according the state and federal National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.

That makes us 13 times more likely to die in an accident than the residents of the city with the lowest rate, Overland Park, Kan., with a rate of 1.23 per 100,000.

The real traffic experts in this town are the everyday drivers who brave Interstate 15 or cross accident-prone intersections such as Paradise Road and Tropicana Avenue, which saw 82 accidents in 2004. These are the ones who see the speeders, the drivers who cut across lanes and those who seem more concerned with munching on a burger than checking out the rear-view mirror.

Gina Deeter, 43, and her husband moved to Las Vegas from Columbus, Ohio, with perfect driving records. Their first two years here, her husband was involved in two traffic accidents, both caused by the other driver.

"There are a lot of selfish drivers out here," she said.

And a lot of dead ones - 302 last year in the valley, an increase of 8 percent from 2004. That's double the population increase for that period.

Whatever the causes, the Las Vegans among the more than 40 people interviewed for this story were all but unanimous in their opinion that many people moving to Las Vegas adjust quickly to the driving culture here - and the adjustment isn't a healthy one.

"Because we're a melting pot, people bring their bad driving habits," Phillips said. "And bad habits are contagious."

In the view of Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, we're paying the price of a community growing frenetically. "Our society is in such a hurry, we've forgotten civility and good driving manners," he said.

Any discussion of Nevada drivers has to recognize the role of growing pains.

There's a joke about Nevada. Every street eventually narrows to a single lane. Construction projects and road building are the usual reasons.

Drivers get stuck in endless traffic jams, adding to tensions and aggression.

In an 18-month period ending this June, Las Vegas alone had experienced or is to experience a total of 27 road closures and street disruptions, including a three-month construction project on Ogden Avenue near Las Vegas Boulevard and seven-month sewer rehabilitation project at Nellis Boulevard near Owens Avenue.

Those projects add to the time people spend in their cars and raises their ire.

"People get hot-headed when they are inconvenienced," said Daniel Lippolis, 71, a retiree who moved to Las Vegas from New York City two years ago.

Other inconveniences also slowly eat away at drivers, not the least of which is the synchronization of traffic lights. Of 1,100 traffic lights in Southern Nevada, about 700 are coordinated, the Regional Transportation Commission said.

"There is something wrong with the timing system of the traffic lights," said Dawit Musazgi, a limo driver with the Western Limousine Service, who spends upwards of 12 hours a day in his limo.

Musazgi spends most of his time shuttling people back and forth on the Strip. He said he often is aggravated by the constant start-and-stop flow of traffic because one light turns green while the next, sometimes as close as 50 feet, will turn red.

Perversely, it seems, even the region's better traffic features also play a role in our bad habits.

The flat terrain and open spaces lend themselves to constructing wide boulevards - which lure some people into becoming passive drivers, said Erin Breen, director of Safe Community Partnership, a program with UNLV's Transportation Research Center.

"It's like driving down your street in your couch," she said. "It's so easy to drive on these roads that you feel you can take your eyes off the road to change the radio station or yell at your kids in the back seat."

Sol Feivish, 78, has lived off and on in Las Vegas for about 12 years. He can't believe the drivers here, especially compared to his native Hopewell Junction, a town of 3,000 in upstate New York.

His biggest complaint: "The drinking. They don't see what they're doing. They don't have all their facilities."

Worse, unlike many cities, where drunken driving is largely a creature of the night, Las Vegas has a 24-hour lifestyle that puts alcohol-impaired drivers on the streets at all hours.

Curtis Douglas, 32, noticed it immediately after moving here from Los Angeles two years ago. Drunken drivers were just a way of life here in the valley.

In 2004, Metro Police cited 3,948 drivers for driving under the influence. In the next year, that number increased by 7 percent to 4,243.

But the problem of driving while under the influence becomes more striking when the huge increase in DUI-related fatalities in Metro jurisdiction is considered. In 2004, 43 traffic deaths were caused by drivers under the influence. Last year, the number shot up to 61.

"You have people partying at different hours," Breen said. "It used to be the joke at the end of the evening, but now it's not socially acceptable."

Another factor in the high accident rates is tied to the essence of Las Vegas.

"It's the tourists," said Donna Potuin, 27. Unlike other drivers interviewed for this story, Potuin was born in Las Vegas. She said that over the years, she has watched the roads become more crowded and the drivers more aggressive.

"I think it's worse now because everyone is in a hurry," she said.

Of the 37.4 million visitors to Las Vegas in 2004, more than half 19.8 million came to Las Vegas by car or bus, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Of the rest, many drove rented cars.

Non-Nevada residents accounted for at least 20 percent of more than 19,000 traffic-related injuries in Metro's jurisdiction in 2004, according to the state Transportation Department.

Statistics, however, don't show who was at fault in those collisions. In other words, we don't know if tourists were the problem - or if they were just inconveniently in our way.

Regardless of the reasons, we behave badly. At some point, our drivers need to take responsibility, said Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, the county's top administrator.

"People have individual responsibilities, more than just complaining about traffic," Reilly said. "My personal experience has been that the flagrant denial or avoiding following traffic signs rivals Southern California. But it's interesting to see how the blame shifts to something else. 'I need a bigger stop sign or a flashing stop sign.' "

If people won't take responsibility, it could be thrust upon them. But in Las Vegas, that isn't happening.

Nearly everyone interviewed for this story - driving instructors, professional drivers, insurance specialists, residents who are on the roads every day - said that a lack of strong enforcement by police in the Las Vegas Valley is the main reason bad drivers here stay bad.

"We have a culture of bad driving here because no one gets caught for breaking the law," Breen said. "Once you run a red light and get away with it, you are more inclined to do it the next time. I don't blame law enforcement for it - I blame a lack of law enforcement for it."

Musazgi, of Western Limousine driver, is from Eritrea's capital, Amsara. There, he said, strong enforcement and stiff fines make for better drivers. You are less inclined to speed or drive drunk when "you might have to pay 600 nafka for a DUI - about one month's wage."

The complaints about enforcement aren't lost on the three valley police agencies, and they say they are taking steps to crack down.

A major reason they haven't done more, the agencies say, is a shortage of officers. On this point, statistics are on their side. Metro, Henderson and North Las Vegas police agencies have one to two officers per 1,000 residents. The national average in urban areas is 2.5 officers per 1,000.

The ratio has begun to improve slowly. A half-cent sales tax approved by voters to pay for more police officers took effect last October. The departments have been recruiting and training more officers as the money comes in.

Last fall, Metro took another step. It began giving new officers who were still in field training two-month assignments to the traffic section.

The shift put 12 more officers on the streets immediately to focus on traffic citations, said Lt. Susan Leach of Metro's traffic detail. The number of citations has jumped 76 percent as a result, to 28,850 the last two months of 2005 compared to the same period the year before.

As the number of recruits grows, so will the number of officers in those two-month stints.

"People won't have that attitude of, 'Oh, I'm not going to get stopped,' " Leach said. "We're going to put fear into these motorists. They will be stopped and cited if they are doing something wrong."

North Las Vegas sent out officers dressed as civilians last summer to walk through crosswalks at busy intersections.

Vehicles that didn't yield to them as they crossed were fined by patrol officers waiting a few hundred yards down the street. Police issued several hundred citations to people for failing to yield during the program, said Tim Bedwell, spokesman for North Las Vegas Police.

Since North Las Vegas Police Chief Mark Paresi took over the department in 2002, the number of traffic officers increased from seven to 17, he said.

The Nevada Highway Patrol has a program that uses three aircraft - two in Carson City and one in Southern Nevada - to spot aggressive drivers along the state's highways, said Sgt. Tony Sabino with the Nevada Highway Patrol.

But Sabino said that agency's aircraft can't fly over the dense, traffic-heavy Las Vegas-area because of the high volumes of airplanes flying in the valley.

"Due to Vegas and the air space, we are limited to rural areas," he said.

The state Legislature has also taken up the issue in recent years. One of the more promising programs - pushed by North Las Vegas Police - would install cameras at red lights to automatically ticket drivers who ran the red lights. The program gained momentum in the Legislature but died after some lawmakers feared that it would be an invasion of privacy.

Assemblywoman Francis Allen, R-Las Vegas, said the cameras seemed like a good idea because drivers need to get in their pocket book in order to stop running red lights.

"People getting into accidents isn't a deterrent," she said. "Getting a $200 fine is."

One recent day in January, three Las Vegas drivers gathered at the Drive Friendly Driving & Traffic School for instruction.

Each one had a story about why he or she had run a red light, or sped down a highway at an unsafe speed or gotten into an accident.

Kelly Christiansen, 23, said she was blinded by the sun, was feeling a little ill and averted her eyes from the road on the day she rear-ended a Ford Ranger pickup truck on Oakey Boulevard.

"If I was paying attention, I might have noticed he was stopping," Christensen said.

Laurie D'Andrea had rented a car to drive to Pahrump so she could go see the annual blooming of the wild flowers. She wasn't familiar with the vehicle, and that's why she was going 20 miles over the speed limit and received a $157 ticket.

"It was a bogus, trump charge," joked D'Andrea, who lives in Las Vegas and is in her 50s.

Jim, who wouldn't provide his last name, told the class he was cited by the Nevada Highway Patrol near Beatty as he was driving home from Carson City. He was doing 92 mph in a 70 mph zone.

Jim is 45. It was his first ticket in at least 15 years, he said. But he didn't appear too upset by the $107 fine.

"I think I'll be more cautious for a while. I'm going to abide by the traffic laws," he said. "But there are times when I won't."

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