Nov 29, 2017 3 min read

I spent a few days this month on the road with a friend helping to drive her car to Colorado, where she’ll spend the winter with family. It was an easy drive due west on Interstate 70 and we encountered rain only briefly on one evening. Most of the trip was highway, but we stopped to sightsee and spend the night in cities in Indiana and Missouri.

Once I returned, it was back to work and my commute on Interstate 79. What I realized that first day back in the rat race was how amazingly aggressive everyone was driving on that highway and how I had apparently grown immune to it by living here and driving I-79 nearly every day. Why does everyone act as if they are racing for the checkered flag at the Daytona 500?

Are we really in that much of a hurry every single minute of the day and night?

When we hit Indianapolis on our trip, we were in the auto racing capital of the world and it was rush hour Friday evening – yet drivers were not tailgating us or weaving in and out of lanes. St. Louis traffic was light but steady Saturday and no one seemed to be blowing by us or yelling and gesturing when we were obviously lost tourists driving downtown. We rolled into and around Kansas City with no aggression from our fellow drivers and traversed the entire state of Kansas with nary a car hogging the left lane or anyone trying to break the land speed record (despite the speed limit being 75 mph).

Home and back on I-79, the onslaught was tremendous: Speeders, tailgaters and weavers were everywhere.

It got me wondering about the reason behind this rude behavior. Is it because we have so many cars on the road here and only two lanes each way to handle all of them? After all, some stretches of highways and beltways in the Midwest spread to three to six lanes each way. Are drivers here just in a bad mood because we’re too crowded?

Out of curiosity, I researched which city in America has the most aggressive drivers. A survey by a San Francisco-based company measuring sudden acceleration and braking shows Phoenix has the most aggressive highway and city drivers followed by San Diego, Los Angeles, Tucson and Memphis. The least aggressive city? Honolulu followed by Boston, Portland and Seattle.

One transportation expert opined that cities with multiple lane superhighways lend themselves to more aggression as drivers see themselves as being on a racetrack.

That shoots down my theory of the overcrowded highways here being to blame.

At least Phoenix can blame it on the desert heat. What excuse do we have?

Here’s another fact: That same survey shows the most aggressive drivers choose Porsches, Mercedes and BMWs with least aggressive drivers piloting Subarus, Fords and Hondas.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.