Everytime someone talks about the local drivers, they said how bad the drivers are.
That they are bad in the rain is something I hear, no matter how infrequent the rain is. (That makes it worse, according to the story, because the average driver isn’t used to driving in rain when they live in the Southwest).
So is there any place in the US that the drivers are GOOD? Courteous, competant, not-maniacs-but-not-Sunday-drivers?
Extremely rural areas don’t count, since there needs to be enough traffic density to truly test how people behave in Traffic.
Wisconsin. With their largely Germanic heritage they obey traffic laws, are courteous, remain alert due to deer constatly jumping into the road, and are used to driving in hazardous weather. Wisconsin drivers are the best. Except when they’ve been drinking.
In my own experiences, Indianapolis, Louisville, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh generally have reasonable drivers. Boston, Atlanta, Washington DC, and Chicago are absolutely horrible pits of insane drivers.
There may other factors in play here such as a good emergency response time and a low ratio of rural versus urban areas. But a rate of 0.62 versus a rate of 1.15 nationally is quite impressive. MA actually had the lowest rate 4 years running.
BTW, the links to the state data doesn’t seem to work when I open it in Google Chrome.
I’m pretty happy with the drivers here in L.A. The traffic here is so brutal that you really need to be on top of things if you’re going to navigate it. People are really pretty good about keeping intersections clear / yielding appropriately / merging efficiently, etc.
Sure, you’ll occasionally have to deal with someone who’s clueless. But on average the skill here is much higher than anyplace else I’ve lived.
They may have few fatalities, but they’re appallingly bad and inconsiderate drivers.
Give me LA any day for its drivers – they let you merge in from on-ramps, let you get out to off-ramps, and stop for pedestrians. It’s true that you have some extreme behavior (like shootings !)), but that’s because you have such a large population that you get samples from several sigma out from the mean.
Having grown up in Wisconsin and lived in Milwaukee, I’ve had the most positive experience there (though I might be biased or be using that as my baseline because that’s where I’m originally from.)
I respectfully differ with CalMeacham and The Hampster King on L.A. traffic, though. I’ve been plagued by a horrible combination of selfish luxury car drivers who will cut across whatever lanes they like to go where they just realized they want to go; clueless or distracted airheads who aren’t aware of the traffic around them; slow-moving first-gen immigrants who are being very cautious or are unaccustomed to driving; and the aggressive lane-switching, tail-gating assholes.
I will say that Los Angeles is an interesting traffic laboratory. It’s an expansive, car-centric metropolis that is home to huge percentage of transplants from across the U.S. as well as the world. And it’s not unreasonable that these transplants are going to be bringing with them the driving “styles” of their region of origin, so it’s reasonable to expect a diversity in driving predilections.
It should also be understood that I am the world’s most perfect driver and that people who drive faster than me are assholes and people who drive slower than me are dumbasses.
For a city, Seattle isn’t bad. People are generally nice about letting you merge as long as you ask instead of pushing, we’re careful about pedestrians and bikes, and horns are rare. Plus everyone knows how to drive in the rain. There are some assholes, yes, but they’re noticeable for their rarity.
Watch out when it snows or freezes, though. Neither our roads nor our drivers can cope with that.
On a recent trip to Seattle, I noticed that most of the drivers on the expressways were AT the speed limit, not 5 or 10 over like most other cities but going 55 in a 55 zone. There were still plenty of clueless drivers in the left lane like anywhere else but they weren’t in a hurry.
Seattle, all the parts of Washington I’ve driven in actually, has great drivers. Sure, they drive a little slow for my taste, but that’s because I usually drive faster than the speed limit.
IME, Wisconsin drivers are more likely to have a couple of particularly bad habits:
On a four-lane divided highway, the left lane is meant to be used for passing. Wisconsin drivers are very good at camping in the left lane, and refusing to move to the right when approached from behind by a faster car. If you’re repeatedly being passed by people going around you on the right, you should move over!
Particularly in Green Bay (my home town), you see drivers ignoring the “cut-out” in the center median for turning left. For example, if they’re turning left into a parking lot, they’ll ignore that special left-turn area, and just turn left from the traffic lane.
I’m frankly not sure what weight I would put on people getting their feelings hurt, versus people getting killed.
Frankly I place a rather low quality on politeness by other drivers. I don’t want other drivers to be polite. I want them to be predictable. A driver that stops in the middle of the road to let someone out is a bad driver, no matter how polite they are.
