The Wright Angle
June 6, 2005

Where the @#$% is a state trooper when you need one?

By Scott Wright

I took a couple days off last week and headed down to Biloxi, Miss. to do a little LEGAL gambling (as opposed to the kind of gambling I sometimes participate in at home). After a day there, my fellow evildoers and I migrated eastward into Florida to enjoy a few days at the beach with some other friends of mine (who are also evil, but in different, non-gambling ways). There was plenty of sunshine down there, and we all had a really good time.

But how much fun I had or how much money I was able to legally wager -- like any adult human being ought to be able to do wherever and wherever he wants, but that's a topic for another column -- is not important. What IS important to me right now is that I spent a lot of time rolling over asphalt in Alabama during the Memorial Day holiday. We traveled over 1,200 miles between 11 o'clock Friday morning and 7 o'clock Tuesday evening. Sure, a few of those miles were in Mississippi and Florida, but the vast majority of them clicked across my odometer right here in Sweet Home.

The thing is, if I had four missing fingers on my left hand I'd still have one more than I needed to count how many state troopers I saw the whole, entire time I was driving quite literally across the entire state of Alabama. We traveled the better part of 900 miles for a total of around 12 hours during the most crowded highway traffic holiday of the entire year and we didn't see a single state trooper in the state of Alabama.

Not one. We saw several in Florida and one or two during a couple of hours driving in Mississippi. But not a single, solitary trooper did we see here at home.

That's fine by me since I like to drive around 85 mph on the Interstate, so I'm not really all that disappointed we didn't run into one or two or three troopers during the course of my vacation. Apparently though, as it turns out, I'm a pretty decent driver. At least I am when it comes to holding the steering wheel in a straight line and my right foot to the floorboard for hours at a time. But, as it turns out, you wouldn't believe how many people are not decent drivers.

I swear, every 50 mph-driving ding-dong, left lane-hugging lug nut and can't-get-up-the-nerve-to-pass pansy with a car, truck, oversized SUV or panel van was on the roads of this state at some point during the Memorial Day holiday. Too often, they were directly in front of me.

For that reason, and because some other drivers aren't as calm as I am when they come upon some @#$%^&* moron who doesn't know how to drive on the Interstate, there are going to be speeding violations and illegal lane changes and improperly-followed freeway traffic laws and even some incidents of road rage and, and … ARRRGH!

None of that from me, though, you understand. I don't know about any of these driving-related afflictions first-hand. But other folks must surely lose their cool from time to time. And the problems which result, seems to me, could be mitigated to a great extent if every once in a while drivers were to see a state trooper parked in the median just to remind them, “Hey, we're watching. Don't do something stupid out there on the highway.”

Unfortunately, as far as any of us Memorial Day drivers could tell, no one was watching us and, believe me, there was plenty of stupid to go around.

On our way home Tuesday afternoon, one driver in Birmingham almost caused a God-only-knows-how-many-car pileup when she came to a dead stop -- a DEAD STOP! -- in the center lane of Interstate 459 in a driving rainstorm after she missed the Highway 280 exit. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper and moving at about 50 mph when she slid to a halt. She then proceeded to dart across two lanes of stacked up, ticked off traffic.

At that point, several disgruntled Alabamians, in a manner usually reserved for Tennessee Volunteer fans visiting Tuscaloosa in the Fall, exhibited their fingers (I will leave it to your imagination to determine which one) in such a manner as to ensure that she knew they considered he to be a “No. 1” driver. Falling rain meant most everyone's windows were up, which kept an audible hailstorm of asterisks, dollar signs and exclamation points from being flung in her direction, as well.

My driver-side window was only slightly cracked but I let her have it anyway, just on principle. Very little of my tirade escaped the interior, though, and unfortunately my friend Gary is still trying to scrub the ampersand stains out of the golf shirt he was wearing.

I was about five cars behind this monumental pileup that didn't quite materialize. When I zoomed past her vehicle I decided to forego the extended digit, opting instead for a long, sustained blast of the car horn. I know she heard the racket as I drove past, and I hope the shrill sound still keeps her up at night thinking about how many people she almost maimed or killed. And thank goodness I was there to rebuke her with my horn and a few unprintable words and phrases, because there probably wasn't a trooper within 50 freaking miles.

Alabama Department of Public Safety Information Manager Martha Earnhardt told me on Thursday that the reason I didn't see any troopers over the Memorial Day holiday was because the force spent the weekend trying to maximize manpower by implementing a program called the Combined Accident Reduction Effort, or CARE. Earnhardt said the troopers were concentrated on parts of the state that were expected to be heavily traveled during the holiday.

“Which roads, exactly?” I asked.

“The major interstates, Highway 331 up from the beaches, areas like that,” she said.

When I told her those were the very roads I had traveled over the holiday weekend without seeing even one state trooper, she gave me the only answer I suppose she could: “Well, they were there. You just didn't see any of them.”

Next, I asked her how many state troopers Alabama actually employs. She told me there are around 330 state troopers currently assigned to patrol duty. After midnight some days there are “about five or six” patrolling the entire state. When I asked if that number indicated a shortage of manpower, she almost laughed at me.

“Oh, yes,” she said, obviously shocked at the question. “We're supposed to have twice that many.”

Gov. Bob Riley's office says he is aware of this disturbing lack of state troopers. They say he's been working since his administration began to try and increase funding for the hiring of new troopers. Communications Director Jeff Emerson told me on Friday the governor's fiscal year 2006 budget will fund 100 officers -- as soon as it's passed by the Legislature.

“The funding was included in the governor's proposed General Fund budget,” Emerson said. “Unfortunately, the Senate failed to bring the General Fund budget up for a vote during the regular session, so it will have to be passed in a special session before October. Gov. Riley is committed to providing enough funding to hire 100 more state troopers in this budget and an additional 100 in the next budget.”

Sounds good, until you learn this: Ms. Earnhardt said that, according to a state study done in the late 1980's and based on population and miles of highway, the Alabama Dept. of Public Safety should have a total staff of nearly 1,000 state troopers.

So even based on 20-year-old data, the troopers are understaffed by around 67 percent. And the numbers are probably worse than that by now. If you're not mad about that, you should be. And if you drive around on the Interstate for a little while -- like I did last weekend -- you will be very mad about it before very long. Trust me on that one.

You might suppose that such a maddening lack of highway patrolling resulted in a cacophony of crashes on the roadways this past Memorial Day driving weekend, but it didn't. Ms. Earnhardt said that as of Thursday afternoon there were only nine reported traffic fatalities in rural Alabama during the Memorial Day holiday, down from 17 a year ago.

All in all, it appears as though we're a pretty safe bunch of drivers here in Alabama, even with practically no one to watch out for us while we travel the highways and bi-ways. In fact, the facts bear it out. According to the results of a test recently conducted by GMAC Insurance, Alabama drivers received an average score of nearly 85 on a 20-question driver's test administered nationally. That number ranks us 15th out of the 50 states.

That's the good news. The bad news is that of the four states surrounding ours, only one -- Tennessee -- fields drivers who scored even close to us. You'd think those yahoos would have scored higher than 25th, too, especially since the favorite color up there is road crew orange. Anyway, Georgia drivers ranked 29th and Mississippi drivers were 35th. Florida drivers -- if you can even label them “drivers”, considering their average score -- ranked 41st.

You know, it's hard to read a license plate when you're hydroplaning past it in a driving rain storm at 50 mph, but I'll bet you the crazy lady who almost killed me was from Tallahassee.

Based on the GMAC test information, my deduction seems likely and makes me feel a little better about my holiday driving experience. Still, if it's all the same to the folks down in Montgomery who hold the purse strings, I'd sure like to have a few extra state troopers patrolling the highways the next time Memorial Day rolls around.
 

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.