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Driven to Become Road Warriors

Linda Purcell, 51, is a former Peace Corps volunteer who sometimes displays a less-than-peaceful presence when she's behind the wheel. "I'd really like to rear-end some people," she says. Juana Arias/The Washington Post

At work, they cooperate. They co-exist. They compromise. They care.

On the highway, swathed in the armor and anonymity of air bag-equipped cars and hulking sport utility vehicles, some Washingtonians become bullies.

They honk. They gesture obscenely. They scream.

And, more and more often, they kill.

Police say aggressive driving is the drunken driving of the '90s -- a common yet deadly phenomenon that can be tamed through unflinching enforcement and focused public attention. And like alcoholism, aggressive driving may actually be a sickness, say those who have studied it.

"Flaring emotions can overwhelm the driver's judgment, leading to violence and risky driving behavior," writes John Larson, author of "Steering Clear of Highway Madness" and a lecturer at Yale University Medical School. "These emotions . . . can lead to pathological changes within the driver's body. The result is disease."

Aggressive driving is a phenomenon tailored to the nation's capital, which teems with intense go-getters who twice a day are jammed onto overburdened roads for long commutes. The area has the worst traffic delays in the country and the second-most congestion.

"Everyone thinks their agenda is more important than everyone else's," said Scott Patterson, 45, of Woodbridge, a communications contract specialist. "Now, every lane is the fast lane."

The result, according to a forthcoming national study, is a 50 percent jump in recent years in deaths and injuries caused by impatience or anger at other drivers or traffic conditions.

In a campaign called Smooth Operator that is to begin April 28, Washington area police plan to target drivers such as Linda Purcell, 51, who sells software in Old Town Alexandria. When this former Peace Corps volunteer is behind the wheel of her burgundy Toyota Camry, drivers beware.

"If there's a lane closed and I move over like I'm supposed to and then some bozo comes up the side, I will let not them in," she said. "I'm paying them back. Sometimes I wish my car was older because I'd really like to rear-end some people."

Same goes for pedestrians who wander into the street against the light or in the middle of the block.

"I get as close as I can to 'em," Purcell said. "I enjoy it. The window's rolled up, but I still turn into a trash-mouth: `You idiot!' "

Physiologists say such behavior begins with a minor irritant: Another driver travels too slowly, weaves, cuts in, tailgates or flashes his lights.

Rage flares: A primitive part of the brain, the limbic system, releases organic compounds called catecholamines, which arouse the nervous system, according to a study by the British Automobile Association. In short, there is an impulse to duel. The car is territory, and any encroachment on it besmirches a kind of primordial honor.

Anger, said the Roman poet Horace, is a short madness. For most people, these hormonal charges pass with just a muttered curse. But for the 20 percent of the population that psychiatrists label "hostile personality types," the brain continues to heat, reaching sustained rage that can express itself as bad behavior behind the wheel.

Or maybe aggressive drivers are simply morons.

During a recent evening rush hour on the Capital Beltway, Trooper Will Rowlette, of the Virginia State Police, watched as a parade of drivers tried to cheat traffic backups by driving on the right shoulder, cutting through solid lines meant to segregate exit lanes and then slicing across three or four lanes when a momentary gap appeared in the line of cars.

And Rowlette was in a marked cruiser.

"The excuses always come down to `I,' " he said. " `I'm late. I need to pick up my kid. I'm trying to beat rush hour. I didn't want to wait.'"

For those looking out for number one, Rowlette has news.

"If someone's on your bumper and you slam on your brakes, two things are going to happen," he said. "He's going to hit you from behind, damage your car and maybe hurt or kill you. And you're going to get a citation, because I didn't witness his driving behavior, and you stopped for no reason. It's like fouls in basketball: It's usually the person who retaliates who gets caught."

Whether the cause is neurosis or knuckleheadedness, aggression on the highway is a killer on the make.

A survey by the AAA Foundation for Highway Safety, to be published in May, found a 51 percent increase in aggressive driving incidents that led to death and injury from 1990 to 1996.

"We need to stop calling it `aggressive driving' and start calling it `deadly driving,' " said Joan Morris, spokeswoman for Virginia's Department of Transportation.

The AAA Foundation survey of 10,000 crashes found that many individuals involved in aggressive driving incidents had "recently suffered an emotional or professional setback, such as losing a job or girlfriend, going through a divorce, or having suffered an injury or an accident."

These enraged drivers, mostly men, develop anger frequently -- at family, co-workers, supermarket cashiers, waiters, just about anyone who fails to meet their expectations. Social controls usually kick in, restraining them from, for instance, punching out someone blocking their path on a busy sidewalk.

Not so on the road. There is something Hobbesian about a man in his car. The English philosopher wrote in "Leviathan" in 1651 that "during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man."

It sounds very much like the state of the George Washington Memorial Parkway during the last year, where aggressive driving has led to five deaths and critical injuries to two other people.

And then there are the proliferating sport utility vehicles -- Blazers and Mountaineers, Explorers and Expeditions, Yukons and Pathfinders.

Police and psychiatrists point to those vehicles in particular as contributing to drivers' dangerous sense of invulnerability. Isolating and intimidating, their giant shells somehow separate one driver from the humanity of another at the same time that drivers must attend closely to the actions of strangers.

The triggers for road rage -- congestion and delays -- are unlikely to ease any time soon. The Washington area is the second-most-congested part of the country, after Los Angeles, and the degree of congestion continues to rise. Moreover, the traffic delays experienced in this region are the highest per capita in the nation, having risen 67 percent from 1982 to 1993, according to the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.

"Aggressive driving seems to be a congested, urban, rush-hour phenomenon," said Brian Traynor, chief of the traffic law enforcement division of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "But the rush hour is now 18 hours a day in some places. It never lets up."

During next month's Smooth Operator crackdown, the D.C. police department, Maryland and Virginia state police and several suburban departments plan a series of "enforcement waves," each lasting seven days.

Officials hope that such campaigns, like earlier efforts against drunken driving, will make aggressive driving socially unacceptable.

"People are acting like it's cool, a means of personal power," said Lucy Caldwell, the Virginia State Police spokeswoman in Fairfax County. "This is a highly stressed region, and we need to reach the point where we say: `This is stupid. This is dangerous. And I'm not going to do it anymore.' "

Lisa Sheikh, a Washington child-welfare researcher who in February started Citizens Against Speeding and Aggressive Driving, said she is modeling her group on Mothers Against Drunk Driving and is developing a 10-point quiz to help aggressive drivers spot themselves.

"One of the biggest hurdles is to make people realize that we're talking about all of us," she said. "We have gotten into some very bad habits we may not even be aware of."

Because aggressive driving has psychological roots, some students of the phenomenon argue that such public education campaigns are as critical as law enforcement sweeps.

"Maybe we can convince them to change for selfish reasons," said Redford Williams, author of "Anger Kills" and director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Williams said people prone to frequent outbursts of anger are much more likely to die young of heart disease. In a study of lawyers, he said, 4 percent of those with a low "hostility" score on personality tests had died by the time they were 50, whereas 20 percent of those with a high score had died by age 50.

Meanwhile, people like this are out there driving.

So look for the red Honda Accord belonging to Chris With, the coordinating curator of art information at the National Gallery of Art and, by all accounts, a super-nice guy off the road.

In a traffic jam, however, "this monster comes out," he said. When a driver roars up behind With and flashes his lights, With will slow down, then speed up when the driver moves over to try to pass him.

And if someone speeds past With, he tries to get behind them at a stoplight.

"I sit there kind of smiling," he said, "hoping they'll look in the rear-view mirror."