Doug Clark: Spokane Standoff leads to Road Rage Confidential

Found myself facing one of our most treacherous civic situations the other night: a four-way stop with all lanes occupied, otherwise known as…

A Spokane Standoff.

Studies show that it’s safer to walk through a downtown drug alley at midnight while waving $100 bills rather than trust four Spokane drivers to follow proper pavement protocol.

Little did I know that this street meet would lead not to higher insurance rates, but to creating the newspaper’s first-ever Road Rage Confidential contest for cool prizes.

More on this excitement in a moment.

Getting back to my standoff, however, at least it began correctly.

Being first to stop, the westbound driver had the honors, which she took advantage of.

No time to think about who was up next thanks to a kid who had pulled behind first-to-leave driver.

He tromped the accelerator on his compact and blew through the four-way without so much as a glance at the rest of us.

(And this little piggy went “wee wee wee” all the way home.)

For a split second I thought about chasing angrily after the lout.

Not being a state representative with an armed glove box, however, I replaced this road rage impulse with the following thought.

Maybe Dan Eacret is right about Spokane drivers.

Maybe we really do suck.

“Spokane drivers desperately need a critique from you relative to their driving habits,” wrote Eacret when he contacted me recently.

The retired Boeing worker moved here from Seattle 10 years ago. Prior to that he lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and twice in L.A.

To cut to the chase, Eacret has logged most of his driving time in large cities with heavy traffic.

Which has led the man to an interesting theory.

He believes that driving in a comparatively uncongested city like Spokane has created a culture of sloppy motoring.

“Our hassle factor is so much lower that we take advantage of it,” said Eacret. “We don’t have quite the pressure on us to drive carefully.”

“The freedom to screw up,” he calls it.

Maybe. But flipping a finger at a cause won’t ease the frustration any. Only a contest with prizes can do that.

Time to vent, people!

Use the contact information below to send me your favorite anecdotes about the roadway numbskulls you’ve encountered.

As in …

The jerk who cut you off, say. Or the idiot at the red light who was putting on her makeup.

Hot-rodders ignoring the speed limit. Old-timers creeping along.

The cop who wouldn’t listen to reason.

Top submissions will win a safe driving documentary like, “The Transporter,” “Bullitt” or a selection from “The Fast and the Furious” collection. Also included is a CD featuring a song about this clown who hit my car.

“Most drivers in major cities – as they turn either left or right on multiple-lane streets – will first turn to the nearest lane and then gradually move across lanes to the lane they want to be in,” reasoned Eacret.

“Not in Spokane. In Spokane drivers will turn a corner and move straight across two, three or four lanes at a time.

“They wouldn’t pass a driver’s test doing that.”

I blame potholes. The continual cranial jolts from driving over Spokane’s moonscape have created a mass soggy brain syndrome common to boxers and crash-test dummies.

Which is why so many Spokane drivers are dazed and confused about when to use a turn signal, especially on certain parts of Division.