Here’s the place to express your road rage

The two things you can't avoid, the saying goes, are death and taxes.

We all know there's lots more than that. How about the weather? Or food. Your boss on the day you didn't notice a dryer sheet poking out of your collar. Olympics spoilers. Headlines about those two kids from the "Twilight" movies, for some ungodly reason.

And traffic.

We all have to get from one place to another place. And we all love to complain about it.

I love to complain about it as much as anyone else. I'm a serial complainer. I complain about everything. The price of bread, the inane celebrity culture we're all suffering through, lousy cellphone service, the weather. I do this even though I know there's nothing complaining will do to fix any of it.

That's not true with traffic. Complaining actually can do something. There are people in charge of making the traffic flow. They're not perfect. They're just people. Sometimes, when you ask, they'll fix whatever's broken, if they can.

That's what this place is for. It's a way of asking those people for help, or holding them accountable when they won't.

I'm Richard Lake, by the way, the Review-Journal's new Road Warrior. I grew up in Las Vegas. Learned to drive here back when Summerlin was an idea. I bought a Volkswagen bug off the side of the road and tinkered with it until it was the ugliest and loudest one in my entire high school.

When I was 18, I took a job delivering pizza. I did that for 10 years, most of it here in Las Vegas. I drove and I drove and I drove, probably a few hundred thousand miles with a pizza on the passenger seat and a race car driver's passion in my heart.

I've driven across the country four times. I've made the drive from Southern Nevada to Northern Nevada enough that I know which gas stations have the best bathrooms along the way. Before I had kids and a responsible job (insert joke here), I used to drive late at night just for the hell of it.

My point is, as much as I love to complain, I love to drive even more. I take the long way from home in far northwest Las Vegas to work at the R-J near downtown every day. It takes me an hour, and I like it that way.

But I don't always like what I encounter out there. Lousy drivers, nonsensical traffic controls, road construction. Part of my job here is to get that stuff fixed. I can help educate those lousy drivers, get the government officials to fix some of the broken traffic control systems, let you and everyone else know about road construction projects that are going to be a headache.

But I can't do it by myself. I need your help.

Have you ever wondered how in the world we ended up with the joke of a road that is Durango/Fort Apache/Rampart? Do you get angry whenever you see people parking in front of the door at the Circle K, even though it's not a marked parking spot? Did you once get a speeding ticket when you could swear you were driving slower than that jerk in the fast lane?

Then we're on the same page, brother.

I drive a 10-year-old car that gets lousy gas mileage and whose hood won't stay open. It's got a broken windshield squirt system and a tendency to purposely wear out the right front tire faster than the other three, just to keep me interested.

I sometimes drive over the posted speed limit. I stay in the middle lane when I'm forced to take the freeway, which I generally avoid because I figure my life isn't worth the 10 minutes I'll save. I've been known to talk on my cellphone while driving, and I once did a 360 in the snow completely by accident, but got lucky and didn't hit anything.

Anyway, all kidding aside, this place is important.

Every year, car crashes kill twice as many people as homicides.

Seriously. More people die in car crashes than are murdered in this country. Heck, more people are killed in car crashes than are injured by guns every year.

You want the numbers? According to the Centers for Disease Control, 34,485 people died in traffic accidents in this country in 2009. That's 3,138 more than were injured by firearms, and 17,686 more than were killed in homicides.

We take driving our cars so seriously, in other words, that we're willing to risk our lives just to go rent a movie.

Like I said, this is important. We're not just talking about traffic and parking and checking your text messages. We're talking about the meaning of life.

So if you have a complaint about a yellow light that isn't working, write me. If you can't for the life of you figure out why the same roads keep getting covered in mud every time it rains, write me. If your commute to work keeps getting disrupted by construction and you want to know why, write me.

Let's see if we can't figure this out together.

If you have a question, tip or tirade, send an email to road warrior@reviewjournal.com. Include your phone number.