These studies can be silly, but the methodology is intriguing.
Insurify is a company that compares insurance offers, and this company decided to compare the “rudeness” of drivers in different cities. To make the comparison, they selected six criteria. Which cities had the greatest per-capita occurrences of these seven offences?
- Failure to Stop – come on, that’s rude, you need to stop.
- Failure to Yield – you’re not letting in merging drivers? Please.
- Hit-and-Run – this one is truly unforgivable.
- Street Racing – we don’t need to use 71 and 75 to test out our modded-out Hondas, do we?
- Tailgating – and they aren’t talking about beers before Bengals games,
- Passing Where Prohibited – remember, you cannot pass someone across double-yellow lines.
- Improper Backing – perhaps a bit more understandable, but still.
They marked these infractions as evidence of “rude driving,” and checked to see which cities had the highest incidences of rude driving.
Turns out that Dayton showed up as the rudest city in Ohio with regards to driving. The Wright-Patterson city had 40.78 per 1,000 drivers with one of these violations on their record. This made Dayton 16% ruder than the Ohio state average.
The national average for rude drivers was 22.65 per 1,000, so Dayton’s 40.78 was notable.
The three cities with the rudest drivers all turned out to be in the Golden State, California.
Ventura, with 64.03 per 1,000 drivers, took the bronze medal. Silver went to Citrus Heights, at 64.14 per 1,000 drivers. The number one city in the United States? Rancho Cordova, California, with a whopping 65.37 per 1,000 drivers.
Of course, one could argue that this merely indicates that California police issue more citations, and pull more people over.
Did Any State Have Polite Drivers?
That said, at the other end of the spectrum are our neighbors to the south, Kentucky.
Of the 869 U.S. cities Insurify looked at, the top two “most polite” cities – where the fewest people per capita had been found guilty of rude driving violations – were Corbin, Kentucky, at 1.86 people per 1,000 drivers with rudeness violations, and Somerset, Kentucky, where only 1.62 out of every 1,000 drivers had a record with any rude-driving violations on it.
According to the website, hit-and-run violations happen in Ohio more than twice as often as they do on average across the United States. Every motorcycle accident lawyer in the Buckeye State shudders at the notion of hit-and-run accidents happening on Ohio’s highways and freeways.