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The Worst Drivers
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I saw an article at Forbes that lists the large American cities with the worst drivers. @ekentgolding, you live in (or near, I guess) #3! Memphis is #2, and Albuquerque is ranked the very worst. Apparently Memphis has a lot of drunk driving and I know @davecarter has often talked about the frequency of drive-by shootings in Memphis.
I was kind of surprised that Chicago is not in the list. Maybe drivers there have improved, because if I had to name a big city I’ve driven in where I have seen discourteous drivers — and especially reckless taxi drivers — it would be Chicago.
What’s been your experience? Does the Forbes list seem about right to you? What are the worst behaviors you commonly see?
Published in General
I’ve said for many decades, and independent of geographic location, that the worst drivers are old men wearing hats.
It never fails.
The only ones worse–in the US–are old men wearing hats whose cars have Ohio license plates, and–in Canada–old men wearing hats whose cars have Ontario license plates.
Change my mind.
(The “old men in hats” business is one of those wonderful things where a person has an idée fixe on a particular issue for years, and eventually decides to look for confirmation on the Internet that others have seen the same sort of thing. A bit of noodling around with search terms along the lines that “old men with hats are terrible drivers” will find lots of supportive anecdotal evidence. LOL.)
I’m amazed Boston isn’t on that top 10 list.
I don’t buy it. I’ve driven plenty in Milwaukee. I’ve driven some in California. I’d rather drive in Milwaukee (#19 on the map) Than the more populous parts of California. Come to think of it, the map lists Fresno too, and I didn’t have a problem driving there.
Since I’ve moved to Hilton Head, I’ve started looking both ways at traffic circles.
I wish I were kidding.
Everyone here is old, and they all start drinking at lunch. By mid-afternoon, it’s pandemonium out there. We have some of the highest car insurance rates in America. And there’s a reason for that.
It looks like this list is really only dealing with fatal car crashes. So you could have a city full of inconsiderate jerks, but as long as they aren’t killing each other in car crashes, they’re off the hook.
So they aren’t counting a whole lot of other bad behavior, such as shooting at other motorists.
And they don’t list, “Fatal crashes caused because some idiot has too much junk in the bed of his pickup with no tailgate, and nothing strapped down.” I once came across a full-size sofa in the middle of a highway.
Based on six years of travelling the Connecticut Turnpike, the truly dangerous ones are either from Massachusetts or New Jersey. The Chowderheads are no doubt thinking such deep thoughts that they are reduced to a state of spatial and temporal incontinence. The Jersey residents are eventually going to be headed back to New Jersey, and have thus given up the will to live.
Detroit gets special mention. I have never before seen an SUV being rolled on a straight, flat, dry section of freeway.
Indy is much worse than its been and going the wrong direction. I think we need to add a theory class to driver’s ed.
Yeah, that’s entirely useless. The way they calculate alcohol related accidents is if anybody involved is drunk. The guy at the bar who takes a taxi home because he wants to be save, his taxi gets rear-ended, that counts. Though I expect you get less of that confounding fatal accidents only I still maintain that the data is bad. I don’t know a thing about how they collect data on distracted drivers but I’d need to be convinced to trust that data at all.
Wait, that’s looked down upon?
And Chicago cars have had enough!
Well, Dave Carter has certainly complained about it, in Memphis. I’m hoping he pops in here, I expect he’s got some stories to tell from his life in an eighteen-wheeler.
I too am surprised by Chicago’s absence in the top tier. The last time I was going through Chicago, I was appalled by the recklessness of the other drivers and also at the number of cars just abandoned on the highways. Ever since then, I have avoided going anywhere near Chicago, even when doing so adds many miles onto my trip.
Worst roads. Pretty good drivers. You have to be to survive where the roads are mostly not on a grid and intersect at all sorts of angles and spacings.
Aggressive, but often competent. I drove a delivery truck in Boston. People had no fear of me. However, when I drove my old beater people feared me a bit more.
Likewise NYC. And it’s hard to get going fast enough for a fatal accident.
Contrast some southwestern cities where everything is on a grid and there are few trees to obscure vision, but enough of the population is drunk 24/7 to overcome their advantages.
I have to disagree with you, She. The worst drivers are feckless and overly aggressive adolescent males.
I asked my wife and son, who both have driven many times with an old man wearing a hat whose car has an Ohio license plate, ‘are they the worst drivers?’
Both answered immediately: no. [EDIT: Patrick said just now, “I would say emphatically no.”]
Incidentally, some of you like to carefully analyze sentences like the one written by She that I refer to, looking for amusingly misplaced modifiers. Clearly, She was on guard: it’s been scrubbed and is humourlessly error-free. Perhaps it’s because she saw another good writer get snared by such a goof recently. Something about President Washington supposedly getting imprisoned by the British as a spy.
Different problems for different age groups. For instance, when you hear about a car going the wrong way down a divided highway, it tends to be an old person driving. When you hear about someone losing control and running over pedestrians while doing doughnuts to impress their friends, it’s a dude under 28.
Invariably driving hatless, in a car with out-of-state plates: Pennsylvania, etc.
Massachusetts has always had a very low fatality rate.
I have always guessed it was because no one can ever pick up any speed here. You can’t trust anyone. :) :)
My kids lived in the Missoula, Montana, area for a few years. Montana had some of the highest fatality rates in the country. The officials out there attributed it to speeding. That makes some sense, I think.
That’s hilarious. If I were to ever vacation there, I would book a hotel near a circle. I’d sit a safe distance away, and … hey, I just had an idea for a new drinking game.
Having driven in most of the contiguous 48, I find that the worst drivers skill- and performance-wise are Midwesterners. Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas. My theory is that they’re accustomed to lots of space and very sparse traffic. The worst drivers behavior-wise, however, are young men and occasionally women.
Your mileage may vary.
Minneapolis Metro area is no picnic.
The CT turnpike stopped going by that name about 30 years ago. Demographics have changed since then.
People who go very slow in the left lane usually fit fairly narrow profiles of NY and NJ drivers, plus another profile more common for MA drivers.
Another narrow profile weaves in and out of lanes at triple digit speeds.
These profiles were almost nonexistent 30 years ago.
Maybe the Turnpike brought it out of them.
If fatalities are the measure, the distance to medical assistance could be playing a roll too.
https://twitter.com/milwaukeecircle?lang=en
When my wife and I first moved to Houston, I was intimidated by the traffic. Worst I’d ever seen. Then I went to a business trip to Boston. She picked me up at Hobby Airport after the trip. As we were getting on to I-45 I said to her, “It’s good to be back in Houston where the drivers are relatively sane.” She glanced at me and said, “You’re kidding.” “Nope.”
She drove a little further, then shuddered. “If that’s true I’m glad you got back alive.” “Me, too,” I said.
Yet they don’t have Boston in their list. Nor do they have Chicago, San Francisco, Las Angeles, or Washington DC. All of which have worse drivers than Houston based on my experiences.
My (limited) experience in LA is that, while the traffic is terrible, the drivers are actually pretty courteous and will do weird things like actually let you change lanes after you put on your turn signal without moving to cut you off.
Requires me to have an X account to see it so therefore it never happened.
It’s a twitter account that features videos of accidents at one particular traffic circle in Milwaukee (just to the south of the 6th street bridge).