The sky is blue and mottled with small, fluffy clouds on a late December day, as Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Lawrence Hopper is dispatched to a single vehicle crash.
With lights on and siren blaring, he reaches speeds upward of 110 miles per hour. He’s on his way to the scene just outside the Salt Lake City Airport, where a pickup truck has hit the right hand barrier at an on-ramp to Bangerter Highway. Three shaken people are standing outside the truck when he arrives. The airbags deployed due to the force of the crash, but no one was injured.
Given the expense the driver will incur repairing his truck and the barrier, Hopper uses his discretion and decides not to cite him.
Yet even after dealing with this incident, he debunks the idea that drivers in Utah are worse than those in other states.
“I think that when a driver does something egregious, [other drivers are] going to automatically assume that that's how they always are. But it just might be that they caught them on a bad day, or whatever it might be,” Hopper said.
Several listeners asked KUER to find out why Utah drivers are so bad. One main factor could be a matter of perception, and Utahns aren’t alone. A 2024 Pew Research survey shows almost half of Americans think people in their community aren’t driving as safely as they did five years ago.
Some of that may be due to a real shift in driver habits since the pandemic. Hit and run rates spiked during that time and remain high. And like elsewhere, Hopper said Utah saw an uptick in speeding violations.
“There was less traffic on the road, and people felt like they could go a little faster.” Though rates have dropped some in recent years, excessive speed is still a major issue in Utah.
“When you're speeding, you're telling everybody that you are more important than everybody else. It’s poor time management and people need to self-regulate. It's the number one cause of fatalities and injuries and crashes here in Utah.”
Going too slow is a no-no as well. The Utah Highway Patrol calls those drivers ‘left lane loafers.’
“If you're going to be going slower than traffic and you're in the left hand lane, you're becoming a traffic hazard and it becomes a violation, and you could get pulled over,” Hopper added.
Still, the biggest problem he sees is road rage.
“When we get a call of a road rage incident that's ongoing, we drop what we're doing and we scramble to get to that location. And I'll always ask them, why is it that you cannot control your emotions? Why do you think that's appropriate? Their answer is always ‘they did this to me and they did that’ as if to justify why it's okay to do what they did.”
The Utah Legislature passed legislation in 2024 to enhance penalties for road rage incidents, as well as improve awareness, education and prevention. It went into effect in July, though several incidents and one death have occurred since then.
Psychology may play a role in the way people lose their cool when driving.
In June, weeks after two separate Utah road rage incidents resulted in two deaths, the University of Utah released a paper titled Triggered behind the wheel: Understanding and avoiding road rage. It points to stress and anxiety as exacerbating factors, as well as certain psychological conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. It also recommends strategies to help control emotions behind the wheel, like being aware of your surroundings, keeping extra distance from the car in front of you and taking a deep breath.
Hopper said for some people, a switch flips in their minds once they are on the road.
“Maybe they feel a bit of invincibility, but people have got to remember that they're not the only ones on the road. We all want to get to where we're going safely.”
