The Driving Challenge: Dare to Be Safer and Happier on the Road

5/20/1949–10/25/1998

PREFACE

Why a Challenge?

I wrote The Driving Challenge during the spring of 2001 and published it in the summer of that year—before, as I often say, the world changed on September 11.

Indeed, the world has changed since then—or at least large parts of it. As happened at the beginning of World War II, and again during what became known as the Cold War, we have been overtaken by history, and much of what we once thought was important has shrunk to insignificance.

One aspect of our world has remained depressingly the same, however. It’s the way people drive on our highways, and it’s every bit as much of a threat to our lives as terrorism.

I admit I probably look at the situation on the roads a little differently than most, because I have been writing about the subject for nearly 20 years. So naturally I tend to pay more attention to what is happening. That distinction aside—or rather because of that distinction—I can say with some confidence that our roads continue to be dangerous, angry, even ugly places.

I’ll get into the specifics later, but for now suffice it to say we’re dealing with one of the biggest public-health problems in America. It kills tens of thousands and injures millions of people each year. Therefore this is not just an academic exercise or intellectual argument—it literally is a matter of life and death. Driving is the most dangerous thing we all do every day.

As I said, I’ve been writing and speaking about this topic for quite a few years, and very little has changed during that time. People still behave badly in large numbers on the roads, and heaven help me if I deign to point out anyone’s faulty or outright bad behavior—be they strangers, friends or family.

That’s the most baffling and frustrating aspect of this topic: Few people seem willing to examine their own contribution to the problem, and even fewer want to consider changing the way they drive, but many take offense at the idea that they might not be driving well or properly.

This is worse than stupid—it’s tragic. Here we are, over a decade into the second century of the Age of the Automobile. We’re a nation of more than 200 million motorists driving nearly as many vehicles. We’re a culture full of car magazines, car columnists, car-talk shows on the radio, and car-preview shows on TV. We own more automobiles, trucks, SUVs and vans than bathtubs or televisions. Until the cell-phone and texting craze began, we owned more vehicles than phones, too.

Yet in all this preoccupation, this near-obsession with vehicles, we exercise no comparable devotion to the development of good driving skills or the establishment of a competent and safe driving population. Sad but true: We lack a good-driving culture. Our programs of organized instruction—high-school driver-education courses and commercial driving schools—remain marginal in their effectiveness. Worse, as I’ll discuss later, some segments of our society actually encourage or even glorify dangerous driving.

Our priorities are out of whack. We devote endless media space and huge amounts of money promoting and analyzing superficial differences between makes and models. As individuals, we respond enthusiastically to this persuasion. We’ll spend hours searching for just the right vehicle that suits us and haggling over the price we pay.

By the same token, few of us devote nearly as much time and effort to something vastly more essential: our personal safety on the road. We regard driving—if we think about it at all—as an incidental part of getting where we want to go.

None of this means we shouldn’t try to change things. Other national campaigns have succeeded, facing just as much indifference or even outright opposition. We can find parallels in related subjects such as seatbelts, child safety seats and, especially, drunk driving. Extensive public-service campaigns, conducted over many years, have managed to change the behavior of a significant segment of the public. Compared with 20 years ago, far fewer of us drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. We also buckle up more, and most of us protect our children properly inside our vehicles.

Despite these efforts, millions of motorists—about 20 percent—still refuse to wear seatbelts. Police continue to arrest thousands upon thousands on DUI charges each year, and more than a few adults remain shockingly clueless about properly restraining their children—or in sufficiently preparing their fledgling teen drivers for the road.

We can react in two ways to this information. One is to complain about how many people act irresponsibly and cause so many unnecessary injuries and deaths. The other is to look at how many people have responded to calls for better behavior. Although the rates of unbelted vehicle occupants and impaired drivers remain too high, those rates nevertheless have been dropping. Some of us are listening. We are doing the right things, and fewer tragedies are resulting.

Now we need to expand our attention to a problem that’s just as serious. We need to deal with bad driving, because how we drive matters, as does how we treat one another on the highways. The consequences of driving carelessly or aggressively are and have been horrible. Bad driving is killing and injuring us at a persistently huge rate.

It’s time we focused on driving in the same way we have addressed the other highway-safety issues. And it’s time to put aside fantasies about sheet metal for a while and concentrate on what’s going on inside our vehicles—inside our heads.

That’s my challenge.

I am determined to persuade you, and as many other people as I can, to fight the highway madness. Here’s the good news: It’s not only possible, it’s downright easy. I’m not proposing some high-performance driving course here. You don’t need to undertake any intensive study. All of the techniques are simple, but they can make a big difference in your safety. You can adopt them quickly with a modest amount of practice. The key is to want to make the effort.

That’s your challenge.

You need to recognize that there really is a way for you to be safer and happier on the road, starting with the next time you drive. First, though, you must do something that is unique in our culture: You must reexamine your driving attitude and behavior. This book will show you how. Take the time to read it carefully and think about what it suggests. If my approach makes sense, then seriously consider putting it into practice.

I’ve tried to construct a basic philosophy you can use behind the wheel, one that promotes safety, sanity and good manners. If you use this philosophy every time you drive, you can not only protect yourself and those around you, but you can also stop being part of the problem. You can take a decisive step toward countering the tide of damage, injury, death and heartbreak that pervades our highways.

But this process will work only if you resolve to be honest with yourself. You must confront your driving habits, completely and without hesitation. Maybe you’ll have to admit that what you’ve been doing hasn’t been in your best interests, or in the best interests of the passengers you carry, or of the others who encounter you along the highways.

If that turns out to be the case—if your self-examination leads you to realize you’ve been driving badly—then by all means stop it! But don’t waste a moment feeling guilty. That helps no one, least of all you. Instead, concentrate on what you’re going to do now—concentrate on how you are going to deal with your newfound insight.

For heaven’s sake, what have you got to lose? Tension? Impatience? Fear? Anger? Are these emotions worth holding onto? Let them go, and try something new that actually pays you benefits—something that simultaneously reduces your risks and your stress. It involves amazingly little: some restraint, common sense, maturity and a desire to change for the better. Significant adjustments, yes, but the results can be major. Very quickly you can be a smarter, safer, happier driver, no matter what is going on around you.

Doubt it will work?

I dare you to try.

INTRODUCTION

A Confession and a Disclosure

Every time I drive, I use all of the techniques I recommend in this book. I’m not perfect at it, of course. Sometimes I slip up. Once in a while I become impatient or irritated—just a little, enough to make an out-loud comment or two about the traffic snarl that has captured me or about what somebody nearby is doing.

Or, sometimes I neglect to look in all directions before making a move, and suddenly I find there’s another vehicle in a space I had assumed was empty—a vehicle occupied by a driver who’s now making an out-loud comment about me.

Or, every so often, I notice that my speed has climbed above the limit.

I mention these things as a way of pointing out that I’m just like everybody else: human and fallible. I make plenty of mistakes. I just don’t want you to think that you’re about to read a book written by someone with a holier-than-thou attitude. That’s not what it’s about—casting blame and pointing fingers, index or otherwise. The roads are full of such behavior already, as is much of modern life.

It’s a dangerous and angry environment out there, and I don’t want to add to it. Instead, I want to talk as straightforwardly as I can about a problem that affects us all. I want to show you that the best way to address this problem is for each of us to try harder to get along as we share the roads, because what each of us does either helps or makes things worse.

So I want to begin with an honest attempt to describe the realities of today’s highways. I want to talk frankly—and sometimes bluntly—about driving, and I want you to do the same with yourself. That’s the only way to approach such a serious subject.

In that vein, I have a confession to make:

I’ve been driving a long time, even before I obtained my license in 1964. I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania, where there were plenty of opportunities to drive at a young age that didn’t involve breaking the law. Many young men like me accumulated early time behind the wheel on privately owned dirt roads and over fields on vast farm acreage. We drove tractors and pick-up trucks as well as cars. One of my boyhood friends even became adept at handling a bulldozer before he was 17.

Also, like many young men of any generation, once I got my license I drove hard much of the time—as fast as I could get away with. Sometimes my behavior was utterly stupid, but I was lucky, unlike three of my friends, who died in crashes only a few years after high school. I never caused a crash, although I did have several, minor, one-vehicle scrapes and a few more narrow escapes. Over the years, I received nine traffic tickets—all deserved. Four were for speeding, three were for running red lights or stop signs, and two were for making illegal U-turns. One of the speeding tickets resulted in my license being suspended for 90 days.

In other words, my driving history has been quite flawed. During more of my adult life than I’d like to admit, I drove the way many people do—especially when I was alone. For me, as for many others, the sight of vehicles clogging the road ahead was tremendously frustrating. When traffic was heavy, I would push and snake as much as I could to get past everyone in front of me, always trying to achieve my goal: a place where the road ahead was clear. The problem was that such a place almost never appeared, and if it did it was short-lived. There always seemed to be other vehicles blocking my way, interfering with my chosen speed. Little did I know that the way to an open road required taking an opposite tack.

I also spent time in the fast lane with a close friend who owned a turbocharged, 1987 Thunderbird. A couple of times a year we’d tour the countryside, taking turns behind the wheel, trying to impress each other with our finely honed skills and lightning reflexes. We loved tooling down winding, barely traveled country roads. They were perfect places, we thought, for wringing out that sleek, black T-Bird.

We survived all of those escapades, but I’m not proud of my behavior. Suffice it to say, I’m glad I managed to avoid harming myself or anyone else. I mention this only to explain that my transition to safety and responsibility was not, thank heaven, the result of a tragedy. It was a gradual process—though I do recall one incident that represented the beginning of my conversion.

It was late-fall 1990. I was headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, near the Bedford Interchange, in the middle of a heavy downpour on a cold, Sunday afternoon. I was driving my 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan, a yacht of a car, with 16-inch wheels and a massive steel frame. It had a pair of white vinyl bucket seats that swiveled to let you sit and exit more easily, flanked by two heavy doors more than four feet wide. They were difficult to open if the car was parked uphill, and they were equally difficult to hang onto if it was parked downhill. In fact, the doors were part of the reason I ended up with the Olds.

The car had belonged to my aunt, who had driven it so sparingly over 12 years that when she died in 1988 the odometer still hadn’t clicked off 30,000 miles. She left the Olds to my mother, who drove it only a few months before offering it to me. Mom was intimidated by the car’s size and power, and she was having difficulty with those doors.

For me, who had been driving sensible—although in my perception underpowered—Volvo station wagons for the previous 15 years, the Olds was a liberating experience. It felt like a return to the good old days of American cars, with its vast expanses of sheet metal, physically huge powerplant, and disregard of fuel economy. I quickly got into the habit of flooring the accelerator and feeling the engine’s 300-horsepower surge from the deluge of gasoline into the 4-barrel carburetor. I particularly liked to cruise the interstates and expressways, 15 miles an hour or so above the speed limit, passing slower vehicles with disdain, and keeping a wary eye open for patrol cars. I liked to think I owned the left lane.

As much as I hated being confined behind other vehicles, I especially hated being passed. Often, when that would happen, I’d increase my speed and close the gap behind the offender. I wouldn’t tailgate or deliberately provoke anyone, but I would begin to play an imaginary game of tag. The other vehicle became my target, and I’d make it my goal to overtake it and put it far behind in my rearview mirror.

I never worried about the dangers, because I always believed I could react quickly enough to avoid trouble.

So it was, that rainy afternoon in heavy traffic. I had begun a challenge on the Turnpike some miles back with a Pontiac Firebird. It passed me, so I caught and passed it. It passed me again and I maneuvered back and forth between the lanes and overtook it. Within a short time our unofficial dueling became more and more daring—because the other driver had joined the game. We drove faster and faster, snaking through the traffic. It had become a clear case of two adults acting increasingly stupid and juvenile—dangerously so.

That’s when a rush of cold and serious thoughts finally entered my stubborn head.

I can’t say I experienced some sort of epiphany, or that I narrowly escaped a disastrous situation that terrified me into reforming. It wasn’t so dramatic. I simply and painfully became confronted with a strong sense of my own foolishness. At that moment I realized my opponent and I were endangering everyone around us for no good reason. Worse, we were depending on the consistency and predictability of the very people we were endangering. If anyone nearby had made