Driven to madness

THOUGH Los Angeles has had more than two dozen freeway shootings and four deaths tied to either road rage or gang violence in recent months, roadway violence is not confined to congested California freeways. It is shattering lives across the country and around the world.

In a recent survey of U.S. drivers, 47% of those polled said they had experienced aggressive and/or threatening driving behavior by another motorist in the last 12 months. The incidents included verbal abuse and/or rude gestures from other drivers, according to the survey by Global Motoresearch Practice of Synnovate.

That dovetails with a 2004 survey by Farmers Insurance Group, which found that more than 10% of drivers admit they have cut off or have wanted to force other motorists off the road. Of the 1,001 drivers surveyed, 37 respondents said they had carried a weapon in case they had a confrontation with a driver. Twenty-four of those surveyed admitted they had gotten into a fistfight with another driver.

Overseas, foreign drivers reported even higher incidents of aggressive or threatening behaviors on the road, according to Synnovate Chief Executive Scott Miller. In Greece and South Africa, 53% and 67% of respondents, respectively, said they had encountered problems with aggressive drivers and threatening behavior.

Recent incidents are both unsettling and widespread. In Brockton, Mass., earlier this month, an angry driver shot a man in the head several times, leaving the victim’s 10-month-old girl covered in blood. The suspect, a former security guard, told police he’d exchanged words with the victim over a traffic dispute.

On Aug. 3, a mother and son in Boston were gunned down in their vehicle when the alleged assailant began chasing them after a roadway encounter. The woman, 55, was shot in the shoulder, and her 17-year-old son was punched in the face and shot in the back. Both survived the attack.

In Australia, meanwhile, a motorist was recently sentenced to six years in jail after the road-rage death of a 2-year-old boy.

Fairley Washington, spokeswoman for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit educational and research group, said it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many such incidents occur because there is no uniformity in law enforcement’s reporting of road-rage accidents and aggressive-driving arrests to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In recent years, though, 10 states have adopted specific laws against aggressive driving; California is not among them.

“The best way to avoid problems with aggressive drivers is to not engage them. If they cut you off, just let it go. Blow it off,” said Washington, whose foundation has studied the problem.

Though tailgating, driving too slow and cutting drivers off can trigger a dispute, making an obscene gesture is what seems to make drivers most angry, she said. “Keep your hands on the wheel. Avoid making any gestures -- even harmless expressions of irritation like shaking your head.

“Pressures are at an all-time high,” she said. “[Drivers] become frustrated and act out their anger.”

Concerned over the aggressive driving trends that have led to deaths and serious injuries, the American College of Emergency Physicians notes that factors linked to aggressive driving include “increased congestion and travel in urban areas, reduced levels of traffic enforcement and a lack of responsible behavior.”

“I think we can expect road rage to get worse in the U.S., especially in the big cities,” said Miller of Global Motoresearch.

“The aggressive-driving trend is still evolving here,” he said. “This is all about space.... Drivers get very emotional when their personal space is threatened.”

In other crowded areas, such as Mexico City or parts of India, Miller said motorists are used to aggressive driving since they have lived with it longer. “If someone cuts them off, they don’t take it personally.”

Although the deadly incidents of road rage are horrific, some auto-safety experts believe that speeding, running red lights, tailgating and other more common forms of aggressive driving pose an even more serious threat on the roads.

The number of deaths and injuries associated with road rage is small compared to the number of lives lost as a result of speeding and reckless driving, said Barbara Harsha, executive director of the national Governor’s Highway Safety Assn., a nonprofit group that represents the highway safety programs of states and deals with issues such as aggressive driving. She said about one-third of all traffic fatalities involve speeding.

Jeanne Wright can be reached at jeanrite@aol.com.