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.
Ha! The rain! How true, it’s unbelievable how people drive here in the rain. And it’s not like it rains here rarely so you are not used to it.
If St. Louis roads weren’t constantly under construction, maybe we could learn to drive on them. I’m one of those people always driving 5 mph under the speed limit, because I was taught it was the limit, not the speed required to be maintained. I use my turn signal,even switching lanes like the book says, and it freaks people out. I slow down at intersections (even where I don’t have to) because so many people drive right through a four way around here.
There are also many many very polite drivers around here, people who will give you a break to merge, who will take turns in a construction zone jam. I just had a polite 18 wheeler slow down to let me get back from the shoulder of I-44 without fretting, etc.
Just don’t expect to find people being polite during rush hour.
Note to Men’s Health: those folks in rural Missouri giving you a two finger wave from the steering wheel are being polite, not rude.
I certainly will give St. Louis drivers an F. I can’t decide which driving trait is the worst: bad manners, aggressiveness, rudeness or ignorance. And which of the preceding causes the following: inept merging and exiting of highways, tail gating, passing in the right lane, running red lights (that yellow is there to tell you the light will turn red), not wearing seatbelts, not requiring passengers to wear seatbelts, honking and making obscene gestures at other drivers (this one is both rude and ignorant), speeding (especially in construction sites), driving slowly in left lane (actually that is a fast/passing lane), talking on cell phone (please concentrate on your driving) applying makeup/shaving/combing hair), weaving through traffic lanes (a youth activity), etc.. St. Louis area, get over it. Men, women, young people. You all are guilty and sometimes you really frighten me.
All of you people talking about “St. Louis drivers”, guess what? YOU are St. Louis drivers and none of you are any better or worse than any of the drivers you are all blathering about. YOU are the drivers the study is talking about and something else: nobody cares where you moved from or where you grew up or whatever. If it’s so darned awful here please, go back where ever it is you came from and do your whining someplace else!!
I’m sure “willys” doesn’t care where people came from, but I bet he’d like to know which high school they went to.
In any case, it is a typical Saint Louisan’s reaction. Let’s just turn our head the other way and pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
p.s. 6 kids injured in a single accident today - 5 of the 6 did not have a fastened seatbelt on, and all 5 were ejected.
All of the comments here sound like one of those stupid books (paraphrasing)… “You might be a St. Louis driver if…” I think everyone, in every city, thinks their drivers are the worst (well, OTHER drivers, of course, right?). It’s driven (pun intended) by your commute home last night, that idiot that cut you off or went through the light or couldn’t figure out how to navigate the merge lane. Yeah, I’ve come across a pretty good number of idiots on the road in my 10 years in St. Louis. But you know what? Idiots and bad drivers are in no higher concentration here than anywhere else. Do I wish people wouldn’t freak out when a single drop of rain or flake of snow falls from the sky? Sure. But c’mon. I know we as a city and a region are trying to find something on which to build our civic pride, but let’s not make it bad driving… ’cause that’s just not unique to St. Louis.