Make it home for dinner alive: Drive safely

We’ve seen what seems to us like an increase lately in angry driving on Valley roads — especially feeder roads that tend to be used mostly by locals. That’s why we are addressing this behavior here.

It would be much nicer to think the woman was from elsewhere who tailgated us for miles, roared by on a double yellow line — headed into a 35 mph curve — and then flipped the bird to what were surely her neighbors in the Pittman Road area.

Likely, she was just in a rush, headed home from work, picking her kids up from school or this or that activity. But this sort of behavior places us all at risk.

It’s not news that the population of the Mat-Su Valley has vastly out-paced our construction of roads to carry all of the new vehicles that arrived with our thousands of new neighbors. That means more of us in vehicles trying to get to work, get the kids to school, get to the grocery store — or heaven help us — to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer this time of year.

Building roads takes years, but there are things each one of us can do immediately to make our roads safer, friendly places.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Stay on your side of the road at all times. Crossing the centerline results in head-on accidents, which are often fatal. By this we mean do not pass in no-passing zones. Double yellow lines mean it’s just not safe.

• Don’t tailgate. Read the Police Beat and count the number of times school buses are rear-ended on local roads. Partly, we think this results from distracted driving, but following too close to stop safely compounds that problem, too.

• Lock your phone in the glove box if you can’t stop yourself from texting and driving. No text is more important than the life of the person you may kill sending just one quick text.

• Drive the posted speed limit. Even if you want to go faster, if the car in front of yours is driving the speed limit, resist the urge to tailgate, honk, make rude gestures and pass when it isn’t safe.

Many of these examples come from tragic news stories we’ve written. Some of these errors in driving resulted in death for the driver, passengers or innocent people in oncoming vehicles.

It’s possible we are more cautious than the average driver because of the brutal realities we see at these accident scenes. It’s never easy to write the news when our neighbors die in tragic ways. But the work seems especially hard — and so much harder for the families of the lost — when people we know die from preventable accidents.

Beyond getting your own driving demons in check, here’s one more thing we can all do to make our roads safer and friendlier immediately: Call 911 and report every dangerous driver immediately.

It used to be that REDDI reports were reserved for reporting drunken drivers, now that “D” stands for dangerous. Dangerous, like passing on a curve, tailgating or otherwise driving in violation of traffic safety laws.

Let’s face it, none of us are in a hurry because we’d rather be cut out of our vehicles by firefighters, treated by medics and flown to a hospital for treatment rather than endure another dinner at home with our family.