Cities with the most "enraged" and nicest drivers

[DBR96A]

FIVE MOST "ENRAGED"

1. Miami
2. Boston
3. New York
4. Baltimore
5. Washington D.C.

FIVE NICEST

1. Pittsburgh
2. Portland
3. Seattle
4. Minneapolis
5. Cleveland

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/worst-c...144x1200080870

[alex1]

sounds about right. Any city in the northeast gets my vote.

[LouisianaRush]

Driving in Miami is crazy.

[PhilippeMtl]

Driving in my own city (Montreal) makes me crazy.

[MolsonExport]

The big three in Canada (montreal, toronto, vancouver) are chock full of assholic drivers. Montreal drivers play 'chicken' with pedestrians (and vice versa). Toronto drivers play 'Grand Prix Racing' on the 401. Vancouver drivers are just in LaLa land.

[LordMandeep]

generally as population increases, the quality of driving goes way down...

My dad went to Calgary in the early 90's and says everyone was driving like it was a big small town. Now we went back in 2005 and he says the drive like "Big city folk now".


The same can be said here, as the population grew from the low 200k from the early 90's to over 450k now, the quality of driving has gone way down.

[TimCity2000]

i might add atlanta to the "most enraged" list. but to be fair, i haven't driven in most of the cities listed.

[urbanactivist]

Yeah, road rage is no joke. More often than ever, you turn on the news and hear about someone who was killed b/c of a road rage incident.

[WonderlandPark]

I wouldn't exactly call Pacific Northwest drivers "nice."

They are often driving in their own little world, in a clueless sort of way. Extremely passive, not going on green lights, up a one way street the wrong way, making a turn into a parking lot painfully slowly. I guess that can be construed as being "nice" because they aren't flipping you the bird or tailgating your ass. I find NW drivers more frustrating than Bostons, at least in Boston there is predictibility, you know that everyone is out there looking out for themselves. Hell, I even flipped a cop the bird (didn't know it was a cop, but the guy rode right on my bumper on Storrow drive and I was already way over the limit). At least in the Northeast you know what you are getting, no tolerance for stupidity, pay attention and drive or the other drivers will let you know about it.

[brian_b]

Just drove in Miami last week and can agree with that ranking. Cleveland surprises me. I have driven there a number of times and never got the impression that drivers were nicer (or less nice) than any other place I've driven.

[R@ptor]

Miami? Boston?

Try that...

1. Cairo
2. Bangkok
3. Beijing

According to many people Tehran should be on that list as well, but I haven't been there yet so I can't say anything about it.

When it comes to the nicest drivers I definitely have to say any of the big Australian cities. Although Sydney's or Melbourne's freeways are almost as full as those of Los Angeles, drivers there are extremely disciplined even compared to the rest of the western world.

[Crawford]

Cairo is usually mentioned as the worst globally.

Mexico City is pretty bad. I see the aftermath of bloody car accidents daily, and there are always people walking around with neck braces.

In the U.S., Miami is the worst. The Northeast is pretty bad, and the Midwest is best. Detroit and Minneapolis drivers are very nice.

[nath05]

Not surprised to see Minneapolis on the list. People use their horns so little here they might as well not have them. I kinda like it that way, to be honest.

[strongbad635]

I learned to drive in Miami, and I can CERTAINLY agree with their ranking as the most enraged driving city. I grew up in Baltimore, and honestly, I don't remember the drivers being particularly rude. When I go back home to visit family, they seem about the same as where I live currently (Denver). As for Washington, DC, I can certainly agree that they are rude and enraged, especially on the Capital Beltway.

I found Portland, OR drivers to be amazingly polite. They just don't seem to be in too much of a hurry or too stressed when they drive (probably because of the smaller amount of sprawl there and the fact that they have some good transportation options and don't have to drive everywhere).

One city I was surprised NOT to see on the list was Dallas. I lived there for 2 years, and I was amazed how rude the drivers were there. Traffic there is also incredibly congested most of the day, the product of a failed policy of trying to build their way out of congestion. Houston, from what I hear, is similar in this vain.

Funny, this survey is of the "most enraged" drivers, but it does not reflect the amount of road rage expressed in a physical way. My guess is that drivers in these cities keep their rage inside the vehicle. A study a few years back noted the top cities for road rage incidents were as follows:

1. San Bernardino
2. Kansas City
3. Phoenix
4. Las Vegas
5. Tampa

[R@ptor]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Cairo is usually mentioned as the worst globally.

Yeah, I've just been to Cairo in January and it's absolutely insane, 10 times worse than anything in Asia. There are basically no pedestrian crossings whatsoever, you have to fear everytime for your life when you want to cross a street and are sometimes trapped in the middle of a 6-lane street with cars racing past you and always almost driving you over.

[Sekkle]

I definitely agree with Portland being high on the "nice" list. I was amazed at how nice drivers here are when I moved from Phoenix. The lack of road rage and aggressive drivers is definitely noticeable. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been really pissed at someone in traffic here. In Phoenix I’d probably get pissed several times a day, depending on how much I had to drive.

The abundance of niceness here can be somewhat annoying at times, though. Here’s an example - I have to merge onto a freeway on my commute home and it is always jammed. The on-ramp where I get on is an auxiliary lane that runs for almost 2 miles before it exits at another interchange. So people have that full length to merge into the general purpose lanes. But 9/10 drivers want to merge as soon as they possibly can, so traffic backs up all the way down the on-ramp. I typically hate assholes who wait until the last possible instant before they merge, but in this case it’s a little ridiculous. But the few people who do zip down the auxiliary lane and merge just before it exits are always let in with no problem. I try to be somewhere in the middle of asshole and disturbingly passive.

[elsonic]

Boston? they're perfectly nice!! compared to what I know.

[mcfinley]

So is this list only measuring driver temperament? If I had to chose between being surrounded by angry but acute drivers vs courteous but oblivious drivers, I'll opt for the former every time.

[tech12]

San Francisco has some pretty angry drivers. A couple months ago, a guy was shot to death as he drove on the highway, in front of his two children, after he "angered" some men in another car by exchanging mean glances. That reminds me of another thing that happened last year...Some dudes were driving, and they got into a fender bender with an old guy. They all got out of their cars, and then one of the dudes car-jacked the old guy, and the other dude shot the old guy to death. I also once met a guy who bragged about how he was driving on the highway, and someone cut him off, so he drove up next to the offender, pulled a gun, and unloaded it into the car's hood. There are crazy asshole drivers everywhere...

Aside from the horror stories though, San Francisco is alright I guess. There seems to be a pretty equal mix of completely horrible clueless drivers, "ok" drivers, and crazy, aggressive, but actually pretty good drivers.

I've noticed though that in Rhode Island, drivers tend to be completely clueless. It was something I noticed every single time I was on the road.

[Buckeye Native 001]

Originally Posted by ForAteOh

IIn Phoenix I’d probably get pissed several times a day, depending on how much I had to drive.

In my experience, Phoenix drivers are worse than even L.A. At least in L.A. people know which lanes are for faster driving and which are for slower driving. I also never encountered anyone in L.A. in the five years I lived there deliberately cut me off because I'd passed them a few miles back and then flip me the bird.

It might have something to do with the condition of the freeways. L.A.'s are older, narrower and with more twists/curves. It actually takes some skill to drive on them (when they aren't clogged with traffic), whereas most freeways in Phoenix (I-17 being the exception) are newer with wider lanes and are mostly in straight lines for miles before you encounter any curves (think I-10 from Goodyear to The Stack).