Posted on: Tuesday, July 27, 2004

EDITORIAL
'Aloha' style driving can be sophisticated

In increasingly urbanized and busy Honolulu, hardly anything gets folks as worked up as does traffic congestion.

Consider the rash of letters and opinion generated by one writer's commentary on tailgating and whether the fault lies in the pokey driver or the impatient motorist behind.

Thus, Transportation Writer Mike Leidemann's takeout on driving with the "aloha spirit" that appeared yesterday set off an immediate buzz around town.

(You can read an early sampling of the reaction in the Letters to the Editor today.)

Both anecdotally and based on more scientific surveys, it appears that Hawai'i drivers are generally courteous and cautious.

We see ourselves as courteous, and the technical surveys by traffic experts and academics seems to back us up.

We let other drivers in, we avoid honking our horns unless we really need to and, as a group, we tend not to speed. We wave each other into our lane and offer the shaka sign to those who do us that courtesy.

That's a good thing, is it not?

Well, perhaps not entirely. Both police and traffic experts say that in driving, there can be such a thing as too much courtesy.

Stopping in mid-block in the middle of traffic to let someone out of a side street or a driveway is certainly a generous thing to do, but it is a recipe for fender-benders and frustration.

Same thing goes for holding up an entire lane of traffic so that the person going the other way can make a left turn.

Or, as another expert noted, the right response to a little rain is not to slow to a crawl but to extend the distance between yourself and the car in front.

So, does this mean we should give up our aloha spirit and shift to a more aggressive style of driving found on the Mainland?

Hardly. While we should be aware of what might be called "foolish courtesy," our generally laid-back, think-of-the- other-guy style of driving has benefits that far outweigh the frustrations.

The first case in point is in our accident statistics.

For instance, Hawai'i ranks 47th in the nation when it comes to making insurance claims for personal injury. This in part may be an artifact of our relatively low speed limits, but it also suggests a low level of aggressive, hostile driving.

Or consider this startling statistic:

Between 1989 and 2001 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) the number of reported accidents dropped from 27,000 to 11,000.

That's despite a surge in the number of vehicles registered and an increase in the number of miles of highways and roads, which means more cars driving more places.

(A cynic might suggest that the number of accidents may not have decreased appreciably, just the number of reported accidents by motorists concerned about increasing their insurance rates.)

But that cannot be the entire story. We are clearly driving more safely and efficiently.

The correct recipe is to drive smart, know the flow of traffic around us, keep distractions to a minimum and — yes — continue to drive with aloha.