Half-Fast And Furious: Road Rage Has Made Dallas Driving Deadly

DALLAS, TX — Tell the truth: When you're driving down from Fort Worth, or up Interstate 35 from Austin, San Antonio or Houston, how do you perceive the cars and trucks motoring along around you?

Are they conveyances bearing souls, stuffed with parents, brothers and sisters, wives and husbands and babies on board? Or are they just objects in your way — a moving maze that you have to squeeze through in order to get to your important destination on your schedule — preferably ahead of them.

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Combine that mindset, which anyone can slip into if the circumstances are right, with the exploding number of local drag races and cases of road rage, and you have a perfect storm of inhumanity brewing.

According to statistics reported by The Dallas Morning News, numbers compiled by an RV rental company and obtained in part from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that Dallas is America's most dangerous city in which to drive.

How fast and furious is the metroplex? Well, Rebecca Lopez of WFAA Channel 5 reported just last week that in the period since Independence Day, the local police have issued some 330 tickets for hazardous driving.

For many, Dallas has become a series of drag strips interrupted by neighborhoods —including danger zones that range from Midway Road and Forest Avenue up north to Grand Avenue to the East, west to Hampton and Jefferson Roads and south to Great Trinity Forest Way.

Dallas also has the dubious distinction of hovering near the top of the list when it comes to rates of traffic fatalities, says the DMN, "with more than 14 deaths per 100,000 residents annually. Compared to the national average, you're about 46 percent more likely to get in a car crash on Dallas streets."

You can fight crime. But you'll never conquer culture, and Dallas roadways have become a festival of machismo, muscle cars and mayhem that make a frequently fatal brew for pedestrians and motorists alike.

Now combine that with the effects of a pandemic that everyone wants gone, but less than half the population has been inoculated against. It's the same basic psychology that has airline flight crews taping passengers to their seats while they're having some kind of mental meltdown.

Only in this case, each one of those little boxes you see speeding by is piloted by someone who values their ability to push the pedal to the metal more than their safety — or yours.

In a city bowed, but not broken by quadrupling COVID-19 hospitalizations, nearly nightly fumigation to kill mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus, and a drug-resistant fungus making its way though area hospitals, Dallas has had it. And any one of these pestilences would have, in my mother's words, "tested the patience of a saint."

But if Dallas is truly a community, and not just an enclave of people sharing adjacent ZIP codes, someone needs to take the wheel to remind us all: Each one of those boxes around us on the road? They're stuffed with us, not them.

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