Middle fingers, shootings, a death in winter. Is Boise-area road rage on the rise?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Police in Ada County say road rage is on the rise, with 911 calls up 24% since 2021.
- Agencies across Treasure Valley use inconsistent tracking but say congestion is a concern.
- Recent road rage incidents include fatal shootings in Payette and Meridian.
It’s 4 p.m., and cars are filling the westbound roads in the Treasure Valley.
Drivers are sending last-minute emails, riding each other’s bumpers, going too fast or too slow, slamming on their brakes, not letting each other merge. Someone drifts beyond their lane and doesn’t signal. Horns sound. A middle finger flies up.
For most people, the conflict ends there.
But in a rare but potentially growing number of instances, local law enforcement officers say, frustrations on the Valley’s increasingly congested roads are escalating into threats, altercations and sometimes deadly violence.
In recent months, road rage incidents in the Boise area, including one ending in a fatal shooting in Meridian, have garnered media attention and raised alarms for some officers, who say road rage is on the rise.
Patrolling a ‘hotbed’ of congestion, rage
On Sunday afternoons, Ada County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Seibert likes to position his patrol motorcycle along the rocky curves of Idaho 55. Seibert, who has worked for the Sheriff’s Office for 18 years, patrolling Eagle for the past six, watches the weekend travelers inch their way south from getaways in McCall and Cascade home to the suburbs of Boise.
He’s “guaranteed” to see a road rage or reckless driving incident on what he calls the “hotbed” road for those types of driving behaviors, he told the Idaho Statesman in an interview.
“It never fails,” he said.
A Boise native, Seibert said he is responding to more road rage incidents than in years past as the Valley’s population grows and commutes lengthen.
“People have gotten less patient,” he said, citing congestion as “the biggest issue.”
Fresh in his mind was an incident from the fall when he responded to a crash during the afternoon rush hour along Idaho 44, or State Street. He said the incident started when one driver allegedly cut off the other. The two drivers then took turns tailgating one another, weaving in and out of traffic and “doing the middle finger thing” for about two miles, he said.
Ultimately, one driver brake-checked the other, slamming his brakes so the tailgater would crash into him.
“This whole stupid thing over the fact that this kid cut him off,” Seibert said, noting that the initial aggressor is oftentimes not the one who escalates a road rage conflict into a crime. In this case, Seibert cited the brake-checker for reckless driving, a misdemeanor.
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Seibert noted that the majority of the road rage incidents he responds to are more minor, though they can run the gamut.
“I always tell people, ‘When you’re road raging, you don’t know who you’re road raging with,’ ” he said. “They could be a very bad person.”
In September, a 71-year-old man from Boise shot and killed another driver during a road rage altercation north of Caldwell that made the shooter fear “for his life,” the Payette County Sheriff’s Office said.
In Ada County, more people are calling 911 about road rage
Data from the Ada County Sheriff’s Office track with Seibert’s observations. From 2021 to 2025, the number of road rage calls into 911 Dispatch rose 24%, increasing each year. Over the same period, the county’s population grew 10%, according to estimates from the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho.
During that time, the county received more than 4,000 road-rage calls.
These calls come from witnesses or people involved in an incident, said Lauren Montague, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office. Montague said dispatchers typically know to code calls as road rage — versus a traditional traffic complaint — when two or more drivers are involved.
“It’s not a perfect number,” Montague said, because it captures only the information available when someone calls 911, not what police learn after investigating. Calls logged as reckless driving can turn out to have been road rage and may be missing from the data, or vice versa.
Tracking the severity of calls and what criminal charges come out of them is time- and cost-prohibitive, she said, because road rage doesn’t have its own criminal code.
Seibert said he’s cited or pursued charges against road ragers for anything from traffic infractions, like following too closely, to crimes like malicious injury to property, brandishing a weapon, assault or battery.
“You have a weapon, an 8,000-pound car,” he said.
Road rage tracking inconsistent across different agencies
Interviews with officers from eight agencies across the Valley revealed inconsistent tracking practices and differing perspectives on whether rage is actually rising — and why.
Nampa dispatchers don’t have a call type for road rage, typically logging them as “attempts to locate,” Sgt. Doug Harward said. According to records reviewed by the Statesman, police received 400 attempt-to-locate calls involving road rage from 2018 through Jan. 29, 2026. Such calls were a fraction of all attempt-to locate calls, and they showed no trend over the past eight years.
To his knowledge, Harward said, road rage incidents in Nampa are seldom severe. “Very rarely do these incidents result in even damage to another vehicle or someone getting physically injured,” he said by phone.
But with growing congestion, Harward said, he encourages people to plan ahead and not “find themselves in a situation where they’re in such a hurry that their priorities change from just safety to rage.”
In Boise, Sgt. Matt Konvalinka said his agency typically gets between 400 and 500 road rage calls per year. These calls followed a similar pattern as Ada County’s, Boise Police spokesperson Haley Williams said, trending up.
Canyon County sheriff: What triggers stressed-out drivers
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue told the Statesman that there’s been “no uptick” in his jurisdiction — but said he would be “surprised” if there isn’t one soon, “because you just have so many people on the road, and tempers get short.”
Donahue said he’s also worried about road construction, out-of-state and bigger-city drivers who are less “laid back, conservative” than locals, and economic strain that can trigger stressed-out drivers.
“Families, economics, living conditions — all that carries with you out on that roadway,” he said.
Plus, Donahue argued, ”There is a percentage of our society who are just criminally oriented.”
Road rage up nationally, but related shootings in Idaho remain low
At the state level, there is no database for road rage data. The Idaho Transportation Department’s crash data excludes any crash that is “intentional,” officials say.
ITD’s office of highway safety does track aggressive driving, which includes some behaviors that could overlap with road rage, such as speeding, tailgating, screaming, and rude hand or facial gestures. According to the office’s annual crash reports, aggressive driving factored into half of all crashes yearly from 2020 through 2024. Aggressive driving crashes in 2024 resulted in 75 deaths.
Nationally, the number of injuries and deaths caused by road rage-related shootings doubled from 2018 to 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Still, these shootings remain low in Idaho compared with other states, the data shows. In a 2023 ranking, Idaho had the fourth-lowest number of people shot in road rage incidents per population.
Brian Horsley, president of the National Traffic Safety Institute, told the Statesman that from his observations and the data his driving-behavior education company collects, road rage and distracted driving are up across the country, two trends he says might be linked.
For over a decade, the company has offered courses in Idaho, including one that teaches drivers about road rage and aggressive driving triggers. Drivers can opt to take these classes to reduce insurance premiums, for example, but they are not required across the state, he said.
A deadly shooting in Meridian
A few miles south of where Seibert likes to perch himself along Idaho 55, Meridian Police Lt. Brandon Frasier is used to responding to traffic calls across the state’s second-largest city. Road rage doesn’t seem to faze him.
“These types of calls are just one more thing in a long list of stuff we have to deal with,” he said in an email to the Statesman. “In the majority of cases somebody involved needs to grow up and get over it so to speak.”
Still, the Meridian Police Department reports that it responded to 169 road rage calls in 2025, up from 114 in 2018. Fifty-five calls mentioned a gun, up from 29 in 2018.
Frasier says that the involvement of a gun doesn’t necessarily mean it was discharged, and in some instances a victim was legally carrying or using the weapon in self-defense. In the more than 1,100 incidents since 2018, he said, Meridian police have made just 16 arrests, including one involving a fire extinguisher used as a weapon.
But it was Meridian where police say that on Jan. 25, a 23-year-old man fired more than a dozen rounds at another driver in what began as a road rage incident, according to Chief Tracy Basterrechea. The other driver, a 27-year-old man, was hit multiple times and died at the scene.
“For me, it’s one of the most — I can’t figure out the term I want to use other than asinine — but I just don’t understand,” Basterrechea told the Statesman.
“I had this conversation with family members and my son,” he said. “Flipping them the bird, yelling at them and getting in this debate, well, are you really going to change their behavior?
“The answer is no.”
Reporter Alex Brizee contributed.
This story was originally published March 2, 2026 at 4:00 AM.
