Untrained, unskilled, uncorrected drivers to blame for most traffic crashes
Saturday, November 19, 2005

By JERRY PAREGIEN

(Jerry Paregien is a retired California Highway Patrol Sgt. who now lives in Kingsport.)


I have been appalled at how frequently East Tennesseans lose their lives.

The days are gone when we could blame our high accident rate on mechanical failure, bad weather, heart attacks, highway engineering or overcrowded highways. We have to face the unpleasant fact that the problem is our ordinary, everyday East Tennessee drivers whose knowledge of traffic laws is lacking, whose driving skills are being outpaced by the new sophistication of highways and traffic controls, and whose willingness to obey simple safety rules has been compromised by a lack of adequate traffic law enforcement. This alone has made East Tennessee an unusually dangerous place to drive.

My wife and I love East Tennessee and its wonderful, kind people more than we can say. We love it so much that when we first visited here in 1995 we went back home to California, sold out, and moved back just as fast as our raggedy convoy of rented trucks could get us here. We have never and will never regret that move. But despite our great affection for the area and its people, we have had to grow into the sobering realization that being killed in an automobile is much more of a possibility in our newly adopted home state than in our old one.

Local folks drive with a very bad understanding of how easy it is to get killed in a car. Therefore, they speed, and speed, and speed. They speed in the rain, in darkness, on winding roads, in heavy traffic, through school districts, and past the front doors of hospitals. They even speed in parking lots and areas brightly posted as "High Collision Areas." Get in the fast lane of an East Tennessee interstate and you will soon have an 80-plus mph driver riding your back bumper. Worse, our local folks go faster than their driving skills qualify them to. Just read the local papers and you'll soon read of an accident where a driver "lost control of his car" and ran off the road. The culprit in most of these cases is, simply, excessive speed for conditions. It's not surprising at all that the Kingsport Police Department alone issued 3,972 speeding citations during the first half of 2005.

Right-of-way violations are as much a part of the East Tennessee experience as sweet tea and rhododendrons. Despite the number of deadly "T-Bone" crashes that result from these violations, our local drivers cut each other off as if Tennessee has no right-of-way laws at all. Typically the result of haste, inattention or a poor knowledge of traffic laws, these violations place everyone on the highway at risk for a devastating crash. If our local policemen need a moral justification for carrying ticket books, this is it.

Then there is tailgating. Although this is known to be one of the most dangerous things a driver can do, tailgating has been elevated to the status of a local art form. The biggest danger here is that the tailgater, seeing that he can't stop in time, will swing into the oncoming lanes and cause a bloody head-on crash, or swerve to the right and slam into a ditch or a tree with often fatal results. It becomes doubly dangerous on interstate highways where higher speeds can lead tailgaters to take evasive action across grassy center dividers and into 100 mph collisions with oncoming interstate traffic. Most local folks don't seem to realize that. This habit is representative of everything I said is wrong with East Tennessee drivers a paragraph or two ago. Tailgating is a terribly ill-advised thing to do.

Another deadly local tradition is cutting corners on left turns. I cannot think of a better way to become involved in a head-on collision than to depart an intersection on the wrong side of the road. It not only puts one into an automatic head-on crash situation, it also places him in an automatic liability situation. After all, what can one say after crashing into someone head-on while driving on the wrong side of the road? Not much. Yet this practice is so ingrained in our East Tennessee drivers as to be a part of the local driving culture, literally.

Running red traffic signals has become an area of great concern in the Tri-Cities, and rightly so. It has gotten so bad here that one takes his life in his own hands when he moves into an intersection on a green light before all of the red light runners have stopped spewing from the opposing left turn lane. This is often a rampant violation in areas experiencing growth in population and traffic; i.e., more cars mean more traffic lanes; more traffic lanes mean more complex intersections and longer waits between green lights. This is where we are at the present time in the Tri-Cities area, and it is only going to get worse because widespread, habitual red light violations are very, very hard to stop.

I dearly love Tennesseans, but I honestly believe that they like stopping at stop signs about as much as they like new taxes. And they don't just "ooze" through them on right turns either; they run them as if they aren't even there. Traffic officers have an old joke to the effect that "STOP" to a lot of drivers is an acronym for "Spin Tires On Pavement." From everything I've seen during my stay in the Tri-Cities, that joke might just have originated here.

There are a huge number of East Tennessee drivers who fail badly when it comes to keeping their automobiles on their own side of the road. Again, this seems to be a deeply ingrained part of the region's driving culture because I see it all over East Tennessee, and it regularly kills people. Living in Indian Springs and driving on Memorial Boulevard, I see it every single day. This particular act is nothing more than sloppy, careless driving that places everyone else on the road in jeopardy.

Failing to give a turn signal is another local habit badly overdone. This usually occurs at the approaches to intersections or while changing lanes on a multiple lane highway. This failure defeats the meeting of the minds needed between converging drivers and ultimately leads many of them into collisions. It is a long-recognized risk to life and limb but remains firmly entrenched in the local driving environment.

Folks in our neck of the woods demonstrate a great deal of confusion over the correct use of two-way left turn lanes, giving rise to the local nickname "suicide lanes." The rules for using these lanes are quite simple. They are for making left turns but may also be used as safety islands for entering the highway from a driveway or a side street - nothing else. One may never routinely drive in them as there is a 300-foot limitation on travel in these lanes. However, local folks often use them as passing lanes, traffic lanes, and acceleration lanes.

Local drivers have a particularly tough time with failing to merge correctly on high-speed highways. All too often we see drivers stopping at the end of on ramps and dutifully giving a left turn signal as if entering a highway from a side road governed by a stop sign. This presents a major hazard to the other drivers approaching behind them who are trying to do it correctly by reaching a highway speed before entering the traffic lanes. There is also a common tendency for drivers in the traffic lanes to completely ignore the needs of the merging drivers as if the right of way belonged entirely to them. This often forces entering drivers to stop abruptly at the end of the on ramp or continue on down the shoulder or, worst of all, to merge unsafely. Merging onto a high-speed highway is best done as a cooperative effort between passing drivers and entering drivers. But around East Tennessee this cooperative effort frequently breaks down in inconsiderate behavior and confusion over who is supposed to do what.

Poor driving skills or inability to control the car stands out as one of East Tennessee's most visible driving problems. From all evidence, there are a considerable number of local drivers who simply do not know how to operate a motor vehicle. They have a poor understanding of accelerating, braking and steering, and do all three badly.

Coming home recently on a two-lane road, I watched a frequently seen error in which a driver took a gentle curve too wide and drifted well out onto the grass shoulder for a hundred feet or so before he regained control. This happened near a spot where another driver recently left the roadway on a gentle curve, slid out into a field and destroyed an outbuilding. Then, awhile back, I was stopped at a red light in Johnson City when a sedan came around a corner too fast, slid broadside and slammed into me. The driver was honestly mystified as to what he had done wrong.

Our newspapers are replete with reports of accidents in which drivers dropped a wheel off of the pavement, overcorrected and wrecked their cars. Others spin out on turns simply because they honestly do not know how to select a safe speed for that particular turn. I have repeatedly seen cars spin out on curves, high-center on berms, drive off of straight roads, slam into curbs while parking, and many other moves that can only be explained as a basic inability to control the car. These drivers are the same fine East Tennessee folks I've grown to love so much, and I'm sure they would like to do it correctly, but they just don't know how.

Few acts speak louder about a community's general lack of caution, disregard for rules, and driving judgment than widespread zooming across large parking lots without regard for marked trafficways or directional arrows. This is one of East Tennessee's more common driving peculiarities. In fact, driving in an East Tennessee parking lot is a lot like driving a boat on a large lake - you must constantly expect traffic to approach from any direction at any time without rhyme or reason.

Many East Tennesseans actually sail through intersections having inoperative traffic signals without stopping or even looking - if the signal doesn't work, then the attitude is that nobody has to stop. I have personally witnessed this several times during power failures at intersections as large and complex as that of Fort Henry Drive and Moreland Drive. As in many other states, Tennessee law requires drivers to stop for inoperative traffic signals as if they are four-way stop signs.

Refusal to wear seat belts kills East Tennesseans with great regularity. Despite a very good "Click It or Ticket" campaign by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and local agencies, our Tennessee friends and neighbors hang on to this one tenaciously, almost proudly. Having seen more than my share of folks die in automobiles only because they weren't wearing their belts, these senseless, easily preventable deaths are a real heartbreak. The "NASCAR mentality" in my lexicon of slang terms, is any and all of the above in any combination when committed as if flying a fighter plane in combat. East Tennessee has an abundance of this kind of driver, and many of them crash or cause others to crash just because their driving skills and maturity levels are both sadly lacking.

These are the folks they invented county jails for.