By MARK DEVOLDER
Los Alamos

1. I was pleased to hear that LAPD is putting more police officers in the field.  Unfortunately, more police officers in the field is a mitigative control and is not a preventive control. Constant monitoring of Los Alamos County driver behavior, reporting of adverse driver behavior, and periodic retesting / retraining of drivers is the only path forward to an improvement in driver behavior. Reducing distractions while driving would help too (for example, cell phone / iphone use, scolding the kids in the back seat of the minivan, combing one’s hair, using map features in autos, fussing with music items, etc.)
2. I recently departed for the Jemez Mountains from Los Alamos late in the afternoon on a weekday.  I was passed on double yellow lines in the Jemez Mountains by no fewer than twenty vehicles.  The vehicles were most likely LANL employees departing Los Alamos around 3 p.m.  A small sedan passed me in Bandelier where there was oncoming traffic in the opposite lane. I had to pull off the road to make room for the small sedan and avoid a potential head-on collision. I have now further restricted my travel times to avoid the terrible LANL drivers. It is my objective to get out of New Mexico before I get killed on the road. 
3. I was traveling north on Diamond in the slow lane near Diamond and Arkansas (a stretch of road I consider to be “THE ACCIDENT AND DEATH CORRIDOR”) on a return trip from the Jemez Mountains.  A vehicle was tailgating another vehicle in the fast lane. Curiously, there was an LAPD truck parked on the north side of Diamond near the LAFD fire station across from the golf course.  However, the relative position of the tailgating vehicle had changed by the time the vehicle reached the LAPD truck location.
4. I have the habit of waving at motorists on the road in Tsikumu Village. I do this in the hope that they will not run over my wife and myself while we are walking. One driver stuck his left hand out of his window and waved at me. However, he was using his right hand to talk on his cell phone. Look Ma – No Hands! 
5. I noticed a vehicle pull out of the east driveway at the Kwik Lube on Trinity.  The vehicle drove in the south-most lane directly into the oncoming traffic lane and then pulled into the west driveway at the Kwik Lube. The only other time I have seen this kind of behavior was during the winter when an LA County snowplow was going in the wrong direction on Central / Canyon between the LAPD station and Mesa Public Library.
6. Vehicles continue to park on the wrong side of the streets in Los Alamos. This requires a driver to cut in front of oncoming traffic to get to the right side of the road. This is a very dangerous driving habit and complicated by dawn- and dusk-restricted vision factors.
7. Los Alamos County drivers appear to be developing a whole new spectrum of driving habits.  Some if not all of the driving habits are dangerous. It would appear that many drivers have quickly forgotten some of what they were taught in driver’s education. Therefore, driving habits are based on whim and not safe driving requirements / experiences.   
8.  I have been reading a book on tort law. It is all about the ability to foresee risk, behave as a reasonable person, and understand “duty of care” (that is, act reasonably, implement preventive and mitigative solutions to minimize risk, and provide compensation to a plaintiff in the event of a breach related to duty of care). Of course, there is more, but I haven’t read about it yet.  As a former hazard analyst, the law makes some sense to me.
9. I realize that many things in Los Alamos go well. For example, sometimes shopping carts at Smith’s are abandoned in various locations. I return some of the carts directly to the store so I get some exercise. However, the majority of the carts are returned to cart stations in the Smith’s parking lot. So many Smith’s patrons are doing what is needed and there are a few folks who do whatever is expedient.
10. In closing, I want to relate a little success story. I picked up a great video at the Mesa Public Library – Disney’s “Miracle.” I must have watched it 7 times. The video is about the USA Olympic Team winning the gold medal at Lake Placid during 1980 (“The Miracle on Ice”). The video starts out with a summary of many things which had gone wrong in America (for example, termination of Apollo moon shots, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran energy crisis, etc.) and includes portions of President Jimmy Carter’s “Loss of Confidence” speech (“It is time that we stop crying and start sweating, …”). The video goes on to provide an explanation about how the USA coach (“Herb Brooks”) created a world-beating hockey team. USA beat the Soviet team with a score of 4 to 3 and then went on to beat Finland to win the gold medal (always coming from behind on scoring).  Coach Brooks indicated that the Soviets might win 9 out of 10 hockey games, but they would not win the USA-Soviet hockey game. To win, Coach Brooks had his team work on their training exercises “again” and “again” and “again”. He said about skating that the “legs feed the wolf”. His team needed to learn about skating, passing, flow, and creativity. This helped to condition and provide stamina to the USA hockey team so that USA could compete with and then surpass the Soviet team. As a result, I tell myself “again” when I start to feel tired or things are not going so well. I think that there is a lesson here for Los Alamos County drivers, too. If their driving behavior is substandard, that behavior needs to be corrected and then practiced again, again, and again.  President Carter was right, too – we do need to stop crying and start sweating.