St. Louis drivers earn failing marks
Men’s Health magazine has come out with new rankings that show St. Louis drivers are the second worst motorists in the country - behind only Columbia, S.C. and earning an F along the way.
According to a brief item on its website, the magazine crunched numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Governors Highway Safety Administration and Allstate Insurance.
It looked at fatal accident rates, including those caused by excessive speeding, and data on speeding, accident frequency and seatbelt use.
Kansas City also received a failing grade and Southern cities held down seven of the 10 worst. The best city, according to the Men’s Health rankings, was Des Moines, Iowa, where drivers earned an A+. (Also earning an A+ were - gulp - New York City drivers).
The fact that two Missouri cities made the list may come as a surprise to some. Missouri highway-safety officials announced recently that statewide traffic deaths had dropped to a 14-year low.
Here’s a link to the article on the Men’s Health web site.
I disagree with this survey and concur with OAK4329. Having been to the Dallas area recently, I can tell you that their drivers are some of the worst. Not only do they drive 10 miles below the speed limit, in the left lane, without a care, they don’t really pay attention to when they need to get into the right lane to exit. Many of them do it at the last minute. And, lastly, they don’t know how to merge properly. Now, Dallas and Fort Worth have some of the worst highway designs that I have ever seen. Poor to almost non-existent highway signage, exits on the left, the merging of too many highways in a single point, lanes that end for no reason, and major highways having too few lanes. St. Louis, and Missouri for that matter, are far ahead on highway design. St. Louis drivers may not be the most pleasant, but they certainly are not the second worst in the country.
I’ve lived numerous other cities and I agree that St. Louis drivers are about the worst I’ve seen. The reference to the study about St. Louis drivers being the most polite, I CERTAINLY have not witnessed that! I am almost hit on a daily basis at a couple of 4 way stops near my house in Webster; apparently people here have NO concept of how a 4 stop is supposed to work! My car insurance rates here are higher than they were in Atlanta, GA and Washington, DC, two of the cities with the worst traffic in the country. To me that speaks volumes.
All Missourians are terrible drivers, since I moved to St. Louis I have replaced my horn twice. How many people from Missouri even know how to use the horn? Not many
please has anyone here in st.louis ever driven in south florida, east coast side along highway 95/turnpike, oh my god they are totally crazy,I actually had another motorist talegate as in up my tailpipe thru a construction zone with no where to go when he does get aroud me he lets a hugh spitwad lose and hits me square in the middle of my window, hello . defensive driving is the only way to survive in florida.even with all the road work here noone has acted in this manner, and i certainly don’t feel the need to speed to make the guy behind me happy.
carl is a very funny guy.two horns haha, yes dallas is awful as well but thats usually texas size obstructions in the roads and their all over texas we’ve seen bowed steel in the roads, rolling barrels(dallas)which all lanes managed to avoid,it was very surreal, atlanta just nuts, xstream driving. can’t grasp st.louis being voted that bad ,we can hardly drive anywhere above a slow crawl due to construction all over. who votes on this anyway?? have they been anywhere else???
South Florida and Las Vegas are both a lot worse than St. Louis. Half the drivers in both places are uninsured, and hit-and-runs are very common.
I agree that in general St Louisans don’t know how to merge. Having moved here from Washington DC, it seems odd to me that Missourians will, as soon as a lane opens for a off-ramp, almost come to a stop in the traffic lane to get into the very tail end of the exit line, rather than matching speeds and slowing slightly to wait for a gap to ease into. The result is a traffic jam that grows from nothing, and the great risk of accidents from fast-moving traffic coming upon stopped traffic.
In DC, despite the much heavier traffic, it’s common practice to slow slightly and make space for merging traffic to enter the traffic lanes, so traffic keeps moving.
I grew up in St. Louis, have lived lots of places around the country and Europe, and now live in Los Angeles. Every place has its share of bad drivers. It seems that every region has its own typical quality to the kind of drivers created by the traffic; it’s kind of like a “grammar of the road” — how people relate to the drivers around them. It is potentially frustrating anywhere there is traffic — people too slow, too fast, too timid, too aggressive, etc. I also think that those studies are not very useful (to agree with the other Mark who posted earlier). I find it more realistic to actually do study it oneself, since, i this kind of situation, that’s what really matters, anyway. I therefore challenge any one of the St. Louis drivers to move to LA and fight cross town traffic for one day and still argue that St. Louis drivers are worthy to be called some of the worse! It’s madness, I tell you, MADNESS!! ;-o
Statistics can “prove” pretty much anything. Drivers here probably aren’t any worse than in other cities of similar size, we just have our own set of unique, unspoken (and unknown to outsiders) set of rules. Things like expecting turning on a turn signal will actually result in other drivers slowing down to create a space for you (it’s a request, not a requirement), not using the turn signal (for either turning or changing lanes), rolling “stops” at our way-too-many four-way stops, and playing the “you go, no you go” game at four way stops (somebody, just go!). Still, compared to places like Denver, where a large number of uninsured drivers equals a large number of hit-and-run accidents, things aren’t all bad here. I also have no real problem with places like southern California and NYC, where more people all seem to “know the rules” and play by them - the challenge here is that not as many people are on the same wavelength . . .
These studies are usually flawed and you never really know where the data comes from. It could be that this is just for the St. Louis City, and does not include the County. This is how we got the “most dangerous” title.
But I will agree that St. Louis has it share of horrible drivers. Decel and Accel lanes are not “traffic bypass” lanes where you can fly 20 cars ahead and then merge at the last minute just to cause further congestion because of your impatience.
Daily I see people doing other things rather than driving. Just yesterday I saw a woman at Ballas and 270 at 6:30pm (horrible traffic at that point) putting eye make-up on. She would just sit there and use her eye liner, eye pencil, blush, etc, all the while traffic was merging around her and she would just go whenever she wanted. She nearly clipped two cars and was completely oblivious to it. Did I mention that her two children where in the back seat?