A national report card has ranked Hawaiʻi as the eighth worst state for road rage incidents after years of being in the bottom half of the list. That might surprise people in the Aloha State, where drivers often go out of their way to be friendly or throw a shaka after a lane change. 

Aggressive and careless? Check. But road rage?

Well, sometimes.

Earlier this month, a man already dubbed “Tesla Road Rage Driver” in California took his anger to the streets of Honolulu and was arrested over the alleged assault of a mother and daughter on May 7.

Nathaniel Radimak, 38, had already served prison time for a spate of violent attacks on women on the roads of Southern California, was a parole violator and had outstanding traffic warrants here. 

A week later, a man was stabbed during another alleged roadway incident in Waiehu on Maui. 

Those cases clearly meet the definition of road rage used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: “an intentional assault by a driver or passenger with a motor vehicle or a weapon that occurs in the roadway or is precipitated by an incident on the roadway.”

Radimak pleaded not guilty to charges of unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle in the first degree and two counts of assault in the third degree, Hawaii News Now reported.

But does it really happen often enough to make ​Hawaiʻi one of the worst offenders?

Yes, according to researchers at the peer-reviewed Journal of Consumer Affairs who found that more fatal accidents and traffic deaths in Hawaiʻi were linked to aggressive and careless driver behavior in 2023 than the year before. The island state ranked eighth, compared with 34th the previous year.

Their findings were based on the most recent data available, through 2023, from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks traffic incidents involving gun violence.

The researchers’ methodology awarded points for six different metrics and the results saw Hawaiʻi rank significantly higher in their annual national “road rage” report card. 

Both the percentage of fatal accidents involving aggressive or careless driving, and the percentage of fatalities involving aggressive or careless driving in Hawaiʻi increased by 10 percentage points, the researchers found.

Not all of those fatal incidents involve actions by drivers that fit the narrow NHTSA definition for “road rage”, said Consumer Affairs spokeswoman Lauren Jobe.

The FARS data records distinguish between aggressive and careless driving crash factors, Jobe said. Careless driving includes inattention or distracted behavior while aggressive behavior includes speeding, tailgating, and cutting off vehicles. 

For the purposes of developing a 100-point rating system and placing each state in a national context, “we’re using that term in order to clarify and make the methodology a little more simple instead of going into each and every individual incident,” Jobe said. 

Small Samples Can Be Misleading

The FARS data that Consumer Affairs uses is in many ways still the best, said Carol Flannagan, who researches light-vehicle safety data at the University of Michigan Transportation Reseach Institute. 

Every state has an office that examines every crash involving a fatality on a public road where somebody dies of their injuries from the crash within 30 days. They look at the accident narratives, code them and send the data through a common national system, similar to the census.

However, she noted that traffic fatalities are still relatively rare. “40,000 deaths a year nationwide is too many, but it’s still a rare event,” she said. 

That creates a problem in less populated states like Hawaiʻi, Wyoming and Rhode Island where the data sample sizes are so small. “Hawai’i had 88 fatal crashes in 2023, and that’s a really small number from a statistical point of view,” Flannagan said. 

Any variations with small number sets can lead to big shifts in the annual rankings that Consumer Affairs releases. Wyoming and Rhode Island also rose in the Journal of Consumer Affairs rankings in the most recent report.

For comparison, Flannagan works primarily on the state of Michigan where “we have thousands of incidents a year, and there’s still variations year to year that are just kind of random.”  

People are always looking for trends, she said, “but nothing in a small way from year-to-year is likely to be a true underlying process that has changed. It needs to be more enduring.” 

Flannagan said lessons can still be derived from the raw numbers for fatal crashes in 2023 in Hawaiʻi.

Half of the 88 fatal crashes in Hawaiʻi in 2023 were classified by FARS as careless or aggressive. Breaking down the numbers further, 28 were deemed the result of careless behavior and 16 were aggressive. 

The distinction between those behaviors is important for highway safety and future planning. 

“They all ended up in bad outcomes,” Flannagan said, “but if you go out and try and stop road rage, you’re not really addressing the careless drivers.”

Sitting in the driver’s seat on any given day it can be hard to tell the difference.

That’s a call police have to make, said Maj. James Slayter of the Honolulu Police Department. “I mean when there’s an intentional act, that changes everything right?”

A collision may have been avoidable if a driver had not been impaired or slowed down, but for police that’s different from an intentional act of aggression, he said.

Slayter said “road rage” cases end up on the desks of the criminal investigation division, but a lot of the traffic division’s enforcement and education efforts focus on driver and pedestrian behavior.

The state’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan 2025-2029 tracked the aggressive driving factors involved in serious injuries and fatal crashes between 2018 and 2022. The top four included failure to yield, crossed centerline, ran off road and failure to keep in proper lane.  

And ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, Slayter said it seems like people are a little more entitled, and a little more impatient. 

And there’s one recent statistic that adds weight to that observation.

As of May 13, the state had 53 traffic fatalities, a 51% increase over the same period last year, the state Department of Transportation said. Nearly half of those incidents were the result of aggressive or reckless driving, preliminary reports show, and 17 of the deaths were pedestrians.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Atherton Family Foundation.

“Data Dive” is funded in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.