http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/breakingnews/ci_23737529/which-5-cities-have-americas-worst-drivers
By Brian Palmer, July 26, 2013
Annoyed Woman Looking Out Her Car Window Gesturing
Imagine: You're driving a
car, and the driver ahead of you is behaving erratically. He can't stay
in a lane. He puts on his left turn signal but doesn't turn. He slows
to a near stop for no apparent reason, then surges forward. Finally, he
makes a right turn from the left lane. You mutter to yourself, "This
city has the worst [expletive] drivers."
What city are you envisioning?
Everyone who has ever set foot on an accelerator thinks they know
where the worst drivers live, but they can't all be right. I set out to
determine which city's drivers most deserve our steering-wheel slamming,
bird-flipping frustration.
First, a caveat. There hasn't yet been a convincing ranking of cities
with the worst drivers, because reliable data is hard to come by.
There's no clearinghouse for statistics on bad driving based on uniform
methodology for every city. This effort will involve compromises and
educated guesses, along with a healthy dose of personal opinion.
Our first stop is the annual "America's Best Drivers Report,"
published by Allstate Insurance Company. Allstate uses claims data to
determine how often drivers in the largest 200 U.S. cities get into
accidents. The report is meant to celebrate the cities with the fewest
crashes, but reporters get far more joy flipping the table upside down
to find out which cities fared the worst. In 2012, the unofficial "worst
drivers" title went to Washington, D.C., followed by Baltimore,
Providence, R.I., Hialeah, Fla.,
and Glendale, Calif.
The report has several
limitations. Allstate insures only about 10 percent of U.S. drivers and
doesn't cover anyone in Massachusetts. (In informal surveys, Bostonians
are leading candidates for worst-driver honors.) Insurance claims are
also only one indicator of inferior driving. The Allstate report doesn't
consider fatalities, drunk driving or other forms of vehicular mayhem.
Finally, the survey fails to take into account the number of miles that
each insured driver covers in a year. Less mileage means fewer
accidents, even if you're a terrible driver.
Still, the Allstate report is both a useful indicator and a good way
to winnow down the candidates. We can safely assume that the city with
the worst drivers is somewhere in Allstate's bottom 50. Phoenix,
Indianapolis and Denver, therefore, are off the hook, along with a raft
of others. One notable escapee is San Diego, the city with the most
drunk driving arrests. Let's also ignore cities with populations below
150,000, because data on those places is limited. Plus, few people have
ever said, "Hayward, California has the worst drivers!" We'll add Boston
back into the mix, based on opinion surveys. (You're not getting off
that easy, Boston.) That leaves 39 candidates.
The first task is to consider mileage. The Center for Neighborhood
Technology's Housing and Transportation Affordability Index estimates
the number of miles that members of an average household travel by car
in a year, broken down by city. Among our candidates, the average is
14,433 miles. (Garland, Texas, tops our list at 19,234 miles, while New
York City is at the bottom with 9,375). We'll incorporate this
information into the data by creating a multiplier based on how many
miles a city's residents drive relative to the average. The Allstate
rankings, for example, are based on the number of years between
accidents. San Franciscans average 6.5 years between crashes, but they
drive 74 percent as many miles as the average for cities in our survey,
so we lower their years-between-accidents to 4.8 to account for how
rarely they drive.
Adjusting the Allstate rankings for mileage this way has significant
effects. Washington, D.C., remains the worst driving city using the
insurance claims data, but Philadelphia surges to second worst. Hialeah
drops seven places, from fourth to 11th.
Next we consider additional indicators. Car crashes are bad, but some
accidents are worse than others. In July 2012, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention published automobile fatality data for major
cities and metropolitan statistical areas from the year 2009. It's
useful for our purposes, but it comes with a couple of caveats. The
researchers didn't publish data for some of the smaller cities on our
list. In those cases, we'll use data from the larger metropolitan area.
In addition, three cities (Boston, Newark, N.J., and Providence) had
fewer than 20 fatalities, but the precise number is unpublished. We'll
assume that each of these cities had 10 fatalities, so we have a number
to enter into the calculations.
Drunk drivers are bad drivers, and some cities have far more of them
than others. Not all locales publish reliable data on drunk driving
fatalities, so we'll turn to the Century Council, an association of
distillers organized to combat drunk driving. The group published the
number of fatalities from alcohol-related car accidents in 2011. The
data are, unfortunately, broken down by state rather than city. So, for
our purposes, the sins of the state will be visited upon the cities.
(New York City has reliable data, so we can use city-specific data in
that
instance.) We can't
adjust the statewide data for mileage, because our mileage numbers
relate only to cities themselves. So DWI fatalities will have to be
computed per capita, unadjusted for how many miles residents of a city
drive.
Pedestrian strikes are another key metric. For this indicator we turn
to the CDC's WONDER, a searchable database of morbidity and mortality
statistics. It's a priceless epidemiological tool as well as a
bottomless source of trivia. The most granular data on pedestrian
injuries and deaths is by county.
You might object to the use of pedestrian injuries as a metric of
driver incompetence, because some cities have far more pedestrians than
others. That's a fair point, but consider New York City. It is, by far,
the most walked city in the United States. Two-thirds of New Yorkers
either walk or use public transit to get to work. According to the
website WalkScore.com, only 2 percent of New Yorkers live in
neighborhoods where cars are necessary. While every pedestrian strike is
a tragedy, there are fewer in New York than you might expect.
Miami-Dade County, a significantly less walked city, had 20 percent more
pedestrian strikes per mile driven between 2006 and 2010 than New York.
A note on traffic tickets, which we won't include in our rankings.
There are all kinds of driving misdeeds that don't show up in accident
and fatality statistics, and some of them are frustrating to other
drivers — failure to keep left, following too closely, failure to
signal, etc. Unfortunately, traffic ticket data is hard to find. New
York publishes ticket data by county, and Washington, D.C., is
occasionally forced to release information through FOIA requests. But
for the most part, cities don't want citizens to know how many tickets
they give out, because fluctuations will be viewed as cynical
coffer-filling rather than safety initiatives.
Ticket statistics aren't reliable indicators of driving habits,
anyway, because they have more to do with policing than with the real
rate of infractions. Consider drunk driving. In 2011, Oregon made 387
arrests for driving under the influence per 100,000 residents in the
state, nearly triple the 132 per 100,000 made in Louisiana the same
year. But the Bayou state lost about twice as many residents per capita
as Oregon in car accidents in which alcohol was involved. Unless
Oregonians are simply better drunk drivers than Louisianans, the data
suggest that arrests do not correlate with the incidence of drunk
driving. There's no reason to believe that running red lights or
speeding would be any different. (For what it's worth, the National
Motorists Association collected data on Google queries from people
around the country to guess which states issued the most tickets in
2010. Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas topped the list. Montana came
in last.)
So we're left with four indicators: No. 1, years between traffic
accidents; No. 2, automotive fatalities; No. 3, alcohol-related driving
deaths; and No. 4, pedestrian strikes. We'll rank the cities in each
category and then combine those into a single ranking. The first three
categories will each account for 27 percent of the total, while
pedestrian strikes will count for only 19 percent, due to low data
quality and variation in pedestrian density.
Is that weighting arbitrary? A little bit. Is the data sketchy in
places? Undoubtedly. Could you think of other metrics? Sure. But this
isn't a policy document. It's a parlor game.
And now, America, on to the cities with your worst drivers.
No. 5: Baltimore.
Baltimoreans just can't keep from running into each other. They were
outside the top 10 in fatalities, DWI deaths and pedestrian strikes, but
their rate of collision couldn't keep them out of the top five overall.
No. 4: Tampa, Fla. Tampa doesn't do any single thing
terribly, but it is consistently poor: 18th worst in years between
accidents, fifth in traffic fatalities, tied for 11th in DWI fatalities,
and 10th in pedestrian strikes. If the city had managed to get outside
the bottom half in any individual category, Tampa residents might have
avoided this distinction.
No. 3: Hialeah. The drivers of Hialeah get into a
middling number of accidents, ranking 11th among the 39 candidates. But
when they hit someone, they really mean it. The city finished third for
fatalities. They also have a terrifying tendency to hit pedestrians.
No. 2: Philadelphia. Drivers in the city of
brotherly love enjoy a good love tap behind the wheel. Second-places
finishes in collisions and pedestrian strikes overwhelm their
semi-respectable 16th-place ranking in DWI deaths.
No. 1: Miami. And it's not even close. First in
automotive fatalities, first in pedestrian strikes, first in the
obscenity-laced tirades of their fellow drivers.
A couple of other noteworthy findings: Californians did reasonably
well. Although the Golden State had seven cities among our 39
candidates, only Glendale finished in the top half of the table.
Louisiana's two entries, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, finished 6th and
15th, owing to the state's terrible record of drunk driving fatalities.
Washington, D.C., the whipping boy of the Allstate rankings, dropped to
16th, owing to low numbers of DWI fatalities. Boston drivers don't
deserve the torment they receive. They have few automotive fatalities
and rarely kill people in alcohol-related accidents. It goes to show how
flawed opinion polls can be.
