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Road Rage on Holiday
The Travel Critic · June 28, 1999

Peter Green got an early taste of summer traffic when he drove from San Jose, Calif., to Mendocino, a small resort town north of San Francisco, over Memorial Day weekend.

"The trip up the coast requires that you travel through San Francisco proper and there are no freeways through the city," he says. "It took more than an hour to get through the city. It was so frustrating, I was actually tempted to turn around and go home."

He didn't. Instead, the purchasing manager for a Silicon Valley telecommunications company promised himself he'd never travel through the City by the Bay on a holiday weekend.

There will probably be a lot of motorists like Green swearing the same thing this summer. A travel forecast issued by the American Automobile Association and the Travel Industry Association of America calls for a robust tourist season, with a 4 percent increase in domestic vacation travel by auto, truck and RV from the same time last year.

Destinations like California will feel it the most. The Golden State ranks second on TIA's wish list for American travelers (27 percent of would-be visitors said they wanted to go). It's topped only by Florida (34 percent). Hawaii is third, with 12 percent of travelers.

The resulting traffic is the stuff of legends. Bonnie Bird, a Washington, D.C., attorney, remembers learning how to drive a stick shift on the precipitous, winding roads of San Francisco one holiday weekend. "Whoa!" she says. "You learn real fast."

I've spent a Fourth of July weekend in the city, too, doing exactly the same thing (why do beginners pick the worst time to practice?). The cars piled up behind me on Baker Street, one of the steepest roads in San Francisco, and I couldn't get out of first gear. Talk about scary.

The horror stories aren't limited to California by any means. Jenny Hart, a network administrator in Dallas, refuses to drive to Austin during holidays because the roads are untenable.

"The traffic has become steadily worse over the four or five years," she says. "If you only encounter one or two idiots roaring by at 100 mph or passing on the shoulder, you've done well - it's bad enough that I joke about it but I also arrive at either end exhausted from the stress."

This is probably as good a time as any to mention the road rage problem. More than six out of 10 motorists report that the behavior of another driver has been a threat to them or their passengers within the past year, according to a recent study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The most common threats? Cutting someone off (36 percent) tailgating (19 percent) and passing too close (15 percent). And these aren't just a couple of Sunday drivers fussing at the feds: one person is killed on America's roads every 13 minutes, the government reports.

Leaving town won't help. On U.S. 2, the main east-west highway in northern Montana, the section that crosses the divide at Marias Pass, just south of Glacier National Park, turns into a circus this time of year.

"Like most highways in this part of the world, it is two-lane," explains Jim Castro, a geologist in Missoula, Mont. "During the summer, tourists flock to the park, many of them from places like Florida, where there are few hills and absolutely no mountains. It seems that all of these tourists show up in 25-foot motor homes with boat trailers and then drive with no regard for curves in the road, wind conditions or other drivers."

Castro says he stays away from the park area whenever possible, adding "I will go 100 miles out of my way to avoid it."

Don't try leaving the country, either. Shari Hartford, who says she's "happy as a clam in my New York City apartment riding the subways" has survived Britain's roads during the summer.

"Needless to say, England presents its very own set of problems. Driving on the 'wrong' side of the road is unnatural for Americans," she says. "We have always found locals to be helpful and understanding. Turned into the hedgerows? Hey, no problem, we're just Yankees."

I guess when it comes down to it, we can't avoid the traffic this summer. So why even try? But the seasonal gridlock does beg a question or two. Why do we all hit the road at the same time? Why are we in such a rush to get where we're going? (I mean, we're on vacation here, right?)

Why do we - and I include myself here - do nutty things like learn to drive on a holiday weekend, in a city with streets that rise to 20-degree inclines? That's one of those mysteries of travel we'll probably never know the answer to.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.