Opinion: Road rage and aggressive driving

Doug Dahl breaks down rising road rage and aggressive driving concerns in WA

Target Zero Manager Doug Dahl answers a question about road rage and aggressive driving

Q: Is it just me, or is aggressive driving and road rage getting worse?

A: How bad is road rage in Washington? If you’ve been the victim of it, pretty bad, for sure. And from a broader perspective, the fact that it occurs frequently enough to have a clever name suggests that it’s far too prevalent. But it’s not as easy as you’d think to put a number on it.

You’re not going to find a Washington law called ‘road rage’. In most states it’s not a legal term; historically it’s been a journalistic one, and we don’t have an agreed-upon meaning. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines it as, “An intentional assault by a driver or passenger with a motor vehicle or a weapon that occurs on the roadway or is precipitated by an incident on the roadway.”

Other definitions include committing a crime, violent anger, or aggressive behavior. If we’re trying to track road rage events, do we count every time someone angrily shakes a fist at another driver, only when one driver assaults another driver, or somewhere in between?

Recently, it’s begun making its way into law in some states. As of 2024, Utah has a road rage law that increases penalties for a driver who commits a crime in response to an incident that occurs on a roadway.

Getting back to our state, USA Today reported that calls to 911 for shootings on Washington highways increased from 602 in 2019 to 937 in 2023. The Gun Violence Archive shows that 11 road rage shootings causing death (3) or injury (10) occurred in 2023, and over the last ten years the average has been 12.5. That’s quite a disparity, so I checked with the Washington State Patrol for some answers.

Over the past five years, reports of roadway shootings have ranged between 800 and 1,100 calls per year. In the vast majority of those calls, when law enforcement arrived there was no evidence at the scene that could lead to an investigation. Sometimes it’s because the criminal activity was traveling at 60 mph and left no evidence. Sometimes there wasn’t an actual crime. For example, some of the shooting reports turn out to be rocks strikes thrown by another vehicle.

When there is evidence – injured victims, bullet holes, vehicle and driver descriptions, dash cam video – an investigation follows. In 2022 the WSP investigated 30 roadway shootings. There were 129 investigations in 2023, 76 investigations in 2024, and 24 so far this year. That’s far less than the number of reports, but any number of roadway shootings is too many. About a third of those shootings are gang related. The rest are a mix of crimes, some of which are motivated by road rage.

But road rage shootings account for only a tiny fraction of aggressive driving events. Washington defines aggressive driving as when a driver commits two or more violations that are likely to endanger people or property, or one intentional violation that requires a defensive reaction from another driver: things like tailgating, speeding, cutting off another driver, running red lights, and weaving through traffic.

Traffic fatalities in Washington have increased from 462 in 2014 to 809 in 2023. It’s hard to say how much of that increase is from aggressive driving, but high-risk driving behaviors, whether done aggressively or mindlessly, contribute to most of those crashes.

So I’ll leave you with the advice I got from the Washington State Patrol: Keep your cool even if the other guy is an idiot. Don’t engage. Nobody wins a fight with multi-ton vehicles traveling at freeway speeds.

The Wise Drive is hosted by Doug Dahl, a Target Zero manager for the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.