Survey: Minneapolis drivers less angry - HUH??
A recent survey by AutoVantage apparently states that, amongst some set of large cities, Minneapolis drivers are "less angry". I guess it depends on how they define "angry".
Granted, out of the five worst and five best cities mentioned in the story, the only other one I have driven in yet is Seattle. But I have driven in some other large US cities, including San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Detroit (though only passing through to Canada en route to New Hampshire) and several trips to America's third largest city, Chicago. As far as I could tell, the drivers seemed better than what I was accustomed to back home, though my opinion may have been influenced by my concentrating on figuring out how to navigate new, unfamiliar roads, rather than being able to notice stupidity on roads I know "like the back of my hand", as the old expression goes.
I won't bother bringing up driving experiences in Germany, Denmark, and Norway, since I know driver's education is much more involved in Germany, and presumably in the Scandinavian countries as well. Unlike here in the States, it appears that you do not get a license in the northern European nations unless you can prove you actually know how to drive, rather than performing parking lot maneuvers without knocking down cones.
Anyway, getting back to driving back here in the States, my guess is that the survey dealt strictly with behaviors that the survey designers labeled as expressing anger, rather than dealing with pure incompetence as well. Having made several trips to Chicago, I will say that, sure, their traffic jams make ours look like nothing. But then, they have several times the one million population in the Twin Cities metro area, and all that traffic has to go from about the 6:00 position to the 12:00 position on the map from the city center, since its eastern shore is on Lake Michigan. I contend that, if Twin Cities drivers followed their same patterns of not knowing how to merge, not yielding to let others merge, tailgaiting, coming almost to a complete stop to gawk at any traffic incident within eyesight, and waiting until the last millimeter to merge and get out of a lane just before it closes, but were faced with the traffic volumes in the physical constraints of greater Chicago, traffic would come to a complete halt here 24/7, until people finally started getting a clue.
Granted, out of the five worst and five best cities mentioned in the story, the only other one I have driven in yet is Seattle. But I have driven in some other large US cities, including San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Detroit (though only passing through to Canada en route to New Hampshire) and several trips to America's third largest city, Chicago. As far as I could tell, the drivers seemed better than what I was accustomed to back home, though my opinion may have been influenced by my concentrating on figuring out how to navigate new, unfamiliar roads, rather than being able to notice stupidity on roads I know "like the back of my hand", as the old expression goes.
I won't bother bringing up driving experiences in Germany, Denmark, and Norway, since I know driver's education is much more involved in Germany, and presumably in the Scandinavian countries as well. Unlike here in the States, it appears that you do not get a license in the northern European nations unless you can prove you actually know how to drive, rather than performing parking lot maneuvers without knocking down cones.
Anyway, getting back to driving back here in the States, my guess is that the survey dealt strictly with behaviors that the survey designers labeled as expressing anger, rather than dealing with pure incompetence as well. Having made several trips to Chicago, I will say that, sure, their traffic jams make ours look like nothing. But then, they have several times the one million population in the Twin Cities metro area, and all that traffic has to go from about the 6:00 position to the 12:00 position on the map from the city center, since its eastern shore is on Lake Michigan. I contend that, if Twin Cities drivers followed their same patterns of not knowing how to merge, not yielding to let others merge, tailgaiting, coming almost to a complete stop to gawk at any traffic incident within eyesight, and waiting until the last millimeter to merge and get out of a lane just before it closes, but were faced with the traffic volumes in the physical constraints of greater Chicago, traffic would come to a complete halt here 24/7, until people finally started getting a clue.
Comments