Somebody grab that oversized foam finger - not the middle finger, grab the index finger - and start the chanting with abandon: ``We're No. 1! We're No. 1!'

A national study supposedly has confirmed what we've known for a long time: Miami drivers are lousy and rude - the worst in the country when it comes to road rage.

But take a closer look and readers will see the supposed road rage survey was nothing more than a well-executed ploy by a little-known automobile club in Norwalk, Conn., called AutoVantage to drum up some publicity in its quest to lure paying customers away from AAA.

The survey, which was widely quoted and disseminated by The Associated Press, really talked about driving behaviors and courtesies, not road rage.

Getting out of your car at an intersection and slicing open another driver's head like a melon with a steel construction ruler - which happened last month in Miami - that's road rage; flying the middle-fingered salute from the safety of your locked, moving vehicle isn't.

Repeatedly ramming a conga line of cars because nothing is moving - which happened recently in Hollywood - that's road rage; getting steamed because the lady next to you is applying her makeup at 65 mph on the Palmetto Expressway isn't.

Road rage is bloody. Road rage is criminal. Getting p.o.'d because the moron in front of you is too busy yammering on the phone to see that the traffic light has changed from red to green - it's aggravating, but it's not road rage. Scratch the surface of the study. Prince Market Research interviewed only 100 people in each of the 20 major metro areas surveyed nationwide.

That means the margin for error, on a city-by-city basis, is plus or minus 10 percent. In other words, the findings from each city could be fairly suspect, but the overall nationwide results - with a margin of error at plus-or-minus 2.2 percent - are much more reliable.

That's all it takes to pass for news in this era of instant infotainment, blogosphere punditry and the unquenchable 24-hour news cycle.

Take a fairly vanilla survey on national driver-courtesy trends, sex it up with the attention-grabbing - and alliterative! - catchphrase ``road rage'' and suddenly your corporation is getting publicity from coast-to-coast on TVs, computers, cellphones and Blackberries.

The bottom line: The survey numbers probably reflect a greater truth.

Nobody doubts that driving in South Florida is hazardous, and getting worse instead of better.

We run red lights. We tailgate. We cut in and out of traffic without signaling. We impatiently block congested intersections. We turn left from the center lane.

The real question is whether we, as a community, want to do something about it.

Got a commuting question or an idea for a future column? Contact Larry Lebowitz at streetwise@MiamiHerald.com or call him at 305-376-3410.

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