Police have issued hundreds of citations, and arrested at least 32 drivers on Oahu so far this year, under a new law that sets tough penalties for excessive speed. That’s defined as going 80 mph or 30 miles over the posted speed. The law, which took effect January 1, 2007, can land you in jail on the first offense. You will automatically lose your license, and pay a $500 to $1,000 fine. Racing is particularly deadly. And now the punishment is severe. But what about the rest of us who speed?
“The vast majority of drivers fall in the other category which is they break the speed limit regularly,” says Leon James, PhD, who has testified before congress about driving habits.
Dr. James wrote the book, “Road Rage and Aggressive Driving.” He has a website called DrDriving.org. So we asked him, why do we do it?
“Our driver education begins as infants,” James told KHON2 News. In our book, we call the back seat of our car road rage nursery.”
That's when Jones believes the desire to speed enters.
“Because we get conditioned,” he said. “It's kind of a psycho-biological conditioning.”
Dr. James thinks we should start driver education early and keep it going all our life, whatever our gender.
“There is a tendency for women to drive like men now, and the gender differences are becoming smaller,” he said. But he says men still drive the most aggressively. “Men mostly take the risk and the passengers they have are women and they get injured as passengers.”
So what's the prescription for better driving? The doctor recommends speaking your thoughts as you drive. When he and students did that, recording their own words behind the wheel, they became aware of how angry they were.
“The vast majority of drivers drive around with seething rage underneath.”
And anger and emotion distract us from what we need to do: drive safely.
It pays to be calm. “We need to work on our mistakes we need to work on our negative thinking.”
One last thought about speeding. At its last tally, the Honolulu Police Department had issued about 22,000 speeding-related tickets so far this year, according to Sgt. Robert Lung of the Traffic Division. And we're not yet half way through 2007.