Driving, Traffic | featured news

We’ve been hearing a lot about the “epidemic” of distracted driving, as U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has dubbed it, and most fingers point to such high-tech diversions as texting and handheld cellphoning.

When it comes to traffic congestion around Washington, even the good news is bad, and it goes downhill from there. The city that so hungers to be No. 1 at something — usually on a gridiron or diamond-shaped field — has again risen to the top as the most congested metropolitan area in the United States, a place where the average driver burns 67 hours and 32 gallons of gas each year sitting in traffic.

Defending motorcyclists who navigate the space between cars hits a nerve among motorists eager for a reasoned conversation on improving life on L.A.'s freeways... During his nearly 40 years as a columnist for this newspaper, my late father occasionally tweaked his readers — quite disingenuously — by belittling his cat, knowing the slur would stir invective so passionate and erudite that he could fill another column without having to do much writing of his own.

Drivers and passengers in the 21st century have heeded the call to "buckle up." Seat belt use in 2012 reached a high of 86%, up 2 percentage points from a year earlier, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's annual survey says.

Federal accident investigators recommended states ban the use of cell phones and other electronic devices by all drivers except in emergencies.

FILE - In this Aug.

Huge increases in deportations of people after they were arrested for breaking traffic or immigration laws or driving drunk helped the Obama administration set a record last year for the number of criminal immigrants forced to leave the country, documents show....

Red light cameras are helping drivers remember that red means stop and are saving lives, according to a new study out Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Google has been working on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

Many states have laws against texting while driving. But many also are more than happy to tweet you about the traffic conditions.