Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When you think of places where the drivers are rude, impatient and likely to flash you an obscene gesture, Idaho might not be the first location that comes to mind – but according to a new poll, the state is home to the highest concentration of unpleasant motor vehicle operators in the United States.
The website Insure.com polled 2,000 drivers from all 50 states, equally divided between men and women, and those responders listed the Gem State as the home of the rudest drivers in America, followed by Washington DC, New York, Wyoming and Massachusetts. Delaware, Vermont, New Jersey, Nevada and Utah rounded out the top 10.
The survey also found that North Dakota was the state with the fewest amount of rude drivers, followed by Maine, New Hampshire, Montana, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin. The state rankings were calculated using a ratio of the nationwide votes for drivers of the state divided by the number of respondents from the state, the website said.
As Chris Woodyard of USA Today noted, “Washington and New York have dense urban environments that make them breeding grounds for rudeness.” Idaho, on the other hand, “is a fairly laid-back state, home to wide open spaces. Relatively speaking, there aren’t many people to be rude to.”
So what makes the drivers in the seventh least-densely populated state in the US so rude?
“The roadways of Idaho present a dichotomy of drivers: Those who are moving so slowly that they’re judged to be rude, and the aggressive drivers who speed around them and flip them off,” Insure.com’s Jeffrey Steele explained in a blog post Monday. “Together, with their opposite yet equally vexing styles of driving, they push Idaho to the top of the rankings.”
Steele interviewed a man by the name of Matt Stubbs, who had recently moved to Idaho from Utah. Stubbs described being amazed by the number of drivers who regularly traveled between five and 10 miles per hour under the speed limit. Slower drivers tend to hold up those traveling behind them, causing those motorists to become impatient.
Second-ranked Washington DC was described by former Los Angeles resident Sam Russell as “self-serving, abrasive and unsafe,” and research also indicates that the nation’s capital is home to the most speeding tickets per capita in the US. As for New York, 41-year-old Steven Lowell shared some interesting stories about the Big Apple.
“I’m trying to figure out if that woman talking on her cell and smoking a cigarette is going to run a stop sign. Good thing she did 75 miles an hour up to the stop sign and then flipped me off for not letting her go,” Lowell told Insure.com, adding that the pedestrians were also rude. “I was just told to [expletive] off by a woman pushing her baby carriage through an intersection against the light because I interrupted her texting and emailing.”
Since the poll asked drivers to name the states where they believed the rudest drivers resided, Woodyard said that it was also able to reveal that vehicle operators in California were the top-ranked haters of those from other states. Arizona, on the other hand, was the state that most hated those slow-paced drivers in Idaho, Steele added.
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