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Legislation, education and roadway design all have their places in curbing aggressive driving and it's more extreme cousin, "road rage," but in the end, personal responsibility is a vital ingredient in any solution to the problem, according to speakers at a Symposium on Aggressive Driving sponsored by the Connecticut Transportation Institute of the University of Connecticut and the South Western Regional Planning Agency.

"Each of us has to be a police officer, not only police other people but police ourselves," keynote speaker Dr. Henry C. Lee, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety, said at the Oct. 28 symposium at the Stamford campus of the University of Connecticut. "If each of us works together, we may have a solution."

The daylong symposium was attended by nearly 100 people representing a wide spectrum of perspectives on the issue, from law enforcement and government to mental health and the transportation industry. David Willis, president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, D.C., cited a study that suggests incidents of road rage have increased seven percent per year through the 1990s, and said polling shows aggressive driving increasingly is identified as the number one traffic safety concern, ahead even of drunk driving. He spoke of AAA's use of brochures, radio public service announcements and anger management videos to battle the problem.

Dr. John Larson, Director of the Larson Institute for Stress Medicine in Norwalk and author of Steering Clear of Highway Madness and the forthcoming From Road Rage to Road Smart, said in his view, road rage incidents may already be in decline. He credited publicity campaigns such as AAA's. "I think one of the things that's happened is it's more visible now," Larson said. "It stands out more now... That in itself is the beginning of change in the right direction."

Larson said the problem is one of attitude, not knowledge. He reported success with a six-hour behavior modification seminar for aggressive drivers. The program focuses on altering drivers' linking self-esteem to objectives they believe can be achieved by driving aggressively, objectives such as reaching a destination in a very short period of time.

Help to curb aggressive driving, in the form of new laws, may be harder to come by, however. Joe Ann O'Hara of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said only two states have enacted aggressive driving or road rage laws, and they are difficult to enforce. One problem is in defining what constitutes such behavior. O'Hara said amending existing reckless driving laws may be a more promising legislative approach.

The symposium also focused on engineering approaches to quelling aggressive driving, especially in slowing speeders on local streets. Suzanne J. Stack of the Federal Highway Administration and David Heinmiller of the Westport Police Department counseled that such devices as speed humps and roundabouts can play a role, but cannot take the place of enforcement. Also, their success is contingent on broad support both in the community among enforcement personnel.