At Intersections and on Freeways, Polite Drivers Are Becoming as Rare as Rain in August

The first straw: You are one lump in the morning’s metal porridge on a hot Harbor Freeway.

Then comes a dyspeptic train of thought formed from last night’s meat-loaf crumble, the drifting Dow, and, in no particular order of ire, the Ayatollah, Dan Quayle and your ex-spouse’s lawyer.

The last straw: A Porsche Turbo slides alongside your gasping Honda Civic. The driver is your ex-spouse.

That’s when the humble become hotheads, self-control unravels and drivers “become frustrated and more aggressive, cut people off or make a hasty left turn at the last possible second,” says Los Angeles Police Lt. Rich Dyer, a specialist in traffic coordination. “They pull along on the shoulder of the freeway and pass everybody at Mach I because they want to get off or want to get around a mess or whatever.

“There is that attitude: Well, if I don’t, somebody else will.”

Within that attitude may be the requiem for civility on the byways and freeways of Southern California, say the law enforcers, the behaviorists and community watchers.

But are good manners brain dead?

“One must wonder about that,” says Raymond Novaco, a psychologist, an associate professor of social ecology at UC Irvine. “They (manners) are being severely impacted by traffic, a loss of community values and a lessening of social norms that regulate antagonistic, ongoing behavior. And self-centeredness.”

Although the depth of highway discourtesy is too new a concern to have been quantified accurately, there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to block Interstate 10:

--A recent study by Novaco of 468 Southern California drivers--286 college students of both sexes and 182 captives of the Harbor Municipal Court traffic school--revealed the “troublesome findings” that 28% of those polled had chased another driver; 10% had thrown objects at another car; 16% yelled weekly at fellow motorists; 6% had bumped other vehicles in anger; and 7% often traded digital disdain. Men were much more likely aggressors. But 27% of the women had been involved in an “argument with threat of violence.”

--Lack of concern for fellow motorists, a Los Angeles police spokesman said, was “the whole foundation” of a new city ordinance aimed at motorists who block intersections. Gridlock citations were first written in January and comprise 1.5% of all traffic tickets written by the Police Department this year--and monthly totals are remaining constant.

--Running stop signs and red lights has become an epidemic, said Los Angeles motor cycle officer Forrest Wilkins, 18 years with the department and now a traffic safety specialist.

“They ran red lights 20 years ago,” he added. “But it seems today that they’re running later and later. They might be four or five car lengths behind the intersection when they have a red and they still plow through.”

--Statewide, a California Highway Patrol spokesman reported, citations for unsafe lane changes, impeding traffic or following other vehicles too closely actually have been showing slight decreases since 1985.

But speeding offenses--considered by some to be the ultimate and most dangerous discourtesy--have risen from 1.1 million in 1985 to 1.6 million last year. And those lone, uncaring occupants of vehicles using car-pool entrances and lanes on California’s freeways are a growing population--from 54,000 violators in 1985 to 62,000 last year.

--Reports of highway violence throughout the state, a CHP representative in Sacramento said, average 31 a week and range from “waving of a weapon . . . knives, baseball bats, to throwing things, bottles, rocks.

“Statewide, since November 1987, there were 1,183 reports of highway violence,” he said. “In Los Angeles County, there were 274 incidents. That’s why 150 new (patrolman) positions were created, principally to create visibility in areas where highway violence has been reported.”

Last summer’s series of shootings on Southland freeways took four lives, wounded a dozen people and were described by one mental health expert as “the worst-case scenario” of hostility among those tailgated or cutoff in traffic.

In May, the driver of a tractor-trailer deliberately rammed 24 cars on freeways between Pomona and Hollywood. He was not under the influence of drugs nor alcohol. Charley Lee, 25, told police he had simply wearied of traffic until “those people who would get out of my way, I wouldn’t hit . . . but if they wouldn’t get out of my way, I would hit them.”

And, given the right mood at the wrong time, few motorists are immune from conduct unbecoming their standard selves.

“I will probably still get up and give my seat to a lady,” admits Joe Kaplan, who has headed the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the National Safety Council for the past 50 years. “But when I get to an intersection, I’m ashamed to tell you, I’m going to be there first.”

Earlier this month, CHP officer Jill Angell was driving an unmarked car north on the Santa Ana Freeway. At Slauson Avenue, she saw two motorists “flipping the international suggestion . . . literally driving at each other and swerving away while trying to sideswipe each other. This was highway violence in the making so I hit my siren a couple of times.”

Both men pulled over. Each accused the other of cutting off and cutting in during freeway entrance. “That’s the kind of thing we are seeing out there a lot,” Angell said.

Capt. Dave Helsel, commander of CHP’s Baldwin Park area, has spent 22 years observing driving habits in the state and he agrees with the diagnosis of psychologist Novaco: “I just think that the whole problem (of highway manners) is a reflection of today’s society.”

In an office corridor, in a store elevator, where there is face-to-face contact, he said, there is graciousness. But a car is a private world where a motorist becomes “king of that domain and there’s no personal contact with other people on the road . . . it’s just a face or a figure as they go by.

“Whereas if you’re in the elevator or in Nordstrom’s and you bump into somebody, you’ll say: Excuse me. Or wait your turn.”

Sleepy Hollow to Melting Pot

In the past half-century, others note, the complexion of Los Angeles has gone from Sleepy Hollow to melting pot. With continuing immigration have come motorists from the screech-and-batter schools of driving.

Said David Grayson, director of engineering and technical services for the Automobile Club of Southern California: “We clearly have an influx of people who didn’t grow up here (Los Angeles) . . . but whether from Italy or France or Korea . . . they have one thing in common: They don’t have the depth of experience of growing up with the freeways.”

And if new Angelenos bring language barriers to their driving, Wilkins added, “it’s difficult to communicate civility.”

He sees further highway friction in the new, enormous distances now covered by city commuters: “Thirty years ago, for people commuting downtown from their bedroom communities, the drive was 30 or 40 minutes. But now you are talking about people driving in from Arrowhead, Big Bear, Elsinore, Santa Barbara and San Diego and back on a daily basis. To spend that much time in a car each day. . . .”

There are 23 million registered vehicles in California, almost double the total 20 years ago. There are more than 6 million vehicles in Los Angeles County--that’s about one per person or 10,000 vehicles for every mile of freeway.

“We’ve just got too many cars crammed in too small of an area and too many people in too much of a hurry to get someplace,” Dyer said. “Here they are in this two-ton steel thing and they can’t move. They’ve got their freedom and everything, but they’re going nowhere.”

(Still, 27% of Los Angeles County commuters find their daily drives “very” or “extremely” congested, according to a recent taxpayer-funded survey by the Wirthlin Group of Santa Ana. That indicates the majority either are not suffering “or perhaps take it (freeway congestion) in stride by force of habit.”

(Said Judith Hamerslough, a senior transportation planner for the Southern California Assn. of Governments: “Our ability to adapt is pretty overwhelming.”)

Psychologist Novaco--now at the start of a five-year study of road aggression--said previous research shows that simply driving a car in clogged traffic causes “psychological arousal.” That translates to increases in blood pressure, impatience and negative moods, and a lowered tolerance for frustration.

Aggressions become less inhibited. Impedance--a driver’s perception of being confined--sets in. The slower and thicker the traffic, Novaco says, the deeper the sense of impedance.

Aggression and Violence

And if other factors accompany the feeling, such as a mental script set by hostile examples of others, aggression and even violence may occur.

Yet as raw and as edgy and as confused our macadam battleground might appear, auto club executive Grayson thinks it could be worse.

“I’ve just visited with an executive from a motor club in Australia and his comment on his driving experiences in Southern California was: ‘You certainly have polite drivers in California,’ ” Grayson said. “So the question of civility is relative. But we shouldn’t rest on our laurels because we appear to be more polite than drivers in Australia, Paris or Rome.”

Then if rest is out, how can we recuperate?

Grayson thinks California governments, having largely handled the technical problems of highway travel, should place fresh emphasis “on the responsibilities of driving.”

Further, he would like to see radio traffic reporters (“a tremendous factor in influencing motorists”) balancing reports of accidents and tie-ups with drive-time encouragement “to get people to sit back and relax.”

Novaco would like to import some autobahn , autostrada , autoroute and Motorway manners to the Hollywood Freeway.

“Behavior in the left lanes, the passing lanes, of major highways is radically different in Europe than it is here,” he noted. In Europe, a driver approaching from the rear will flash his lights at impeding traffic. “It is a polite reminder to move out of the way. People do move out of the way. Unperturbed.”

And the passing driver knows road behavior “is predictable, it is safer . . . and everybody is paying attention to everybody else.”

Subtle Driving Infractions

Novaco also thinks it is high time for law enforcers to pay attention to more subtle driving infractions. “A person is rather promptly pulled over for speeding,” he said. “But people are not at all pulled over for being in the left lane and failing to use the rear-view mirror for a distance of 10 miles.”

CHP’s Helsel, on the other hand, suggests a return to human basics: “I think the bottom line is that everybody has to sit down and do some self-evaluation and re-evaluation about their driving. I hate to use the old saying, but, by God, the Golden Rule sure applies out there: Treat others as you wish to be treated.”

If all else fails, be a Buddha behind the wheel.

That’s the message of “Zen Driving” (Ballantine: $6.95) by two San Francisco brothers, psychotherapist Todd Berger and Music Makers magazine editor Kevin Berger.

For freeway jeebies, instruct the brothers Berger, try inner calm. Open road, open mind. Replace your horn with your mantra. Accept moving meditation by doing your zazen at 65.

Cars, they claim, are expressions of a driver’s personality. When a man is irritated, his car will behave erratically. “So our whole thing is: Gosh, give your personality a rest while you’re in the car,” Kevin Berger said.

“Remain mindful of the fact that every single individual is responsible for making traffic flow freely and as soon as you put a snag in the works, you’ve screwed up the whole thing,” he added. “If you can just . . . acknowledge that we’re all on the road together, then manners, or simple civility, will return.”