We have moved up from #3 last year to #2 in the Rude Driver Sweepstakes.
Let’s just flash our highbeams at Miami to get them out of the way and next year we will take the crown. Ugh. Yeah, I know, you don’t think you’re rude. That’s what they all say:
Many drivers view their own cities as being either the same or better than other cities in terms of driver courtesy.Q. Are the drivers in your metropolitan area more courteous, less courteous or about the same as drivers in other cities?
When I moved here two decades ago I gave the drivers here the politic label “aggressive.” It didn’t last long. Within a year I had transitioned to calling them “rude ~expletives deleted~”. These weaving maroons are costing all of us money. They cause more accidents which in turn makes our auto insurance rates go up. Please just follow the Rules of the Road. Here’s one, try it sometime!
… and checked their methodology. From what I can discern (not a lot of explanation there) the study doesn’t measure relative rudeness per se. It measures the rate of the reporting of rudeness within a geography. Since they only ask Boston drivers about Boston and Miami drivers about Miami, we can only conclude that we find our drivers more rude than Miami residents find Miami drivers. One can’t conclude that one city is actually more rude than others. Miami could have very much more polite drivers, but residents that are much more sensitive and more likely to report rudeness.
Will no doubt be flying off the shelves, as drivers everywhere seek to emulate our glorious achievement.
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p>Here’s a toast to, “Beat the Green.”
Michael Goldman (?) made a hilarous commercial for WBZ’s Traffic on the Threes a few years ago, with this tag line – truest words evah spoken!
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p>The only reason we can’t overtake Miami is that they have guns. someday…
… I was teaching in the Northern VA (DC) area. I had a conversation with another teacher from Illinois about driving. He was dismayed when I expressed that I’d rather drive in Boston than in DC and that the divers were worse in DC. He had been to Boston and said, ‘you’ve got to be kidding’. I mentioned the abundance of VA drivers willing to run red lights… but also that I couldn’t really blame them because nobody has any urgency to hit their gas when the light turns green either. I explained that my impression is that MA drivers (at least at the time) seemed to have a better sense of situational awareness than what I was seeing in general in VA and DC (although MD was very much better than VA or DC).
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p>I also offered the following “If I’m on a crowded highway rolling at 75 mph not quite bumper to bumper (a common occurrence on 93 at the time) and there is some kind of accident right in front of us, I hope all the drivers around me are from MA because if they are, most if not all of us will get through this. If they’re all from VA, we’re all dead.”
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p>Whatever one might think of the alleged rudeness, we must be good ‘situationally aware’ drivers to be able to survive the situations we create for ourselves every day. Darwin would have culled the herd long ago otherwise.