[chadgeidel]

I live in a town of spectacularly bad drivers so I may be jaded, but I just can't believe folks will "figure this out". People where I live have a hard enough time figuring out what lane they should be in on a straight two lane road let alone merging, signalling, stopping at intersections, one-lane roundabouts, etc.

[treeface]

You might think so, but everyone says this everywhere in the world. For example, this is the top argument that people use against the implementation of the generally-safer, higher-throughput modern roundabouts. Without fail, every time a modern roundabout is installed, the exact same thing happens: congestion is eased, the incidence of fatal accidents falls some 90%, and a multitude of people say things like "well, I just couldn't believe that these people where I live were smart enough to handle it, but it worked!"

What people usually attribute to bad driving is usually the fault of poor traffic planning. Humans tend to be the same, circumstances change.

[asmithmd1]

Massachusetts has the worst drivers in the the country - that is a fact - MA has the highest accident rate in the US. I blame the roads. Every intersection in MA is unique - there are no idioms. Take a look at these two intersections with 4 lane roads that were recently "fixed"

Just keep moving or you will be stuck for hours: http://maps.google.com/?ll=42.361501,-71.070455&spn=0.00...

Something for everyone: overpass, circle, and jug handles:

http://maps.google.com/?ll=42.24915,-71.171166&spn=0.002...

[treeface]

Massachusetts has the worst drivers in the the country - that is a fact - MA has the highest accident rate in the US.

A high accident rate is not proof that Massachusetts "has the worst drivers in the country". I've lived in Massachusetts (and New Jersey, California, and a bunch of other places that like to call themselves the "worst drivers"), but everywhere I go, it seems apparent to me that road conditions and layout account for the huge majority of deviations from place to place.

For example, in New Jersey there are a ton of highways that don't have onramps (or about 15 feet of it). Because of this, there are a lot more (I mean a LOT more) collisions on the "onramp" and people generally are used to swerving in front of 65-mph traffic from a complete stop.

In California you have just as many people (or maybe more) who swerve in and out of lanes at unreasonable speeds, but since there are so many lanes and since they're all so fantastically wide, that sort of behavior doesn't get punished as it might, say, on the Mass Pike or the Garden State Parkway. At the same time, city roads in California (at least in OC) tend to have much higher speed limits. This causes a marked increase in fatal collisions at these types of intersections...not because the people are inherently more aggressive, but because the roads shape their behavior.

[cafard]

I have often thought that the state seal of Pennsylvania should include a stop sign at the end of an on-ramp. It also has a way letting bridge abutments jut about halfway out into a lane so that the merge and exit lanes are divided.

[oh_sigh]

Do you realize the stupidity of what you just said? First you said "MA has the worst drivers in the country". And then literally 14 words later you say "I blame the roads".

What is it? Bad driver, or bad driving conditions?

[chadgeidel]

(sorry for replying so late - I just remembered this comment)

I wholeheartedly agree that we should increase driving standards, and better traffic engineering is the first step. I was just commenting on the fact that most people I talk to don't want to learn how to make their morning commute safer and more efficient.

[treeface]

Well that's exactly the point...most people don't want to learn, regardless of geographical location. The trick in traffic engineering is to devise solutions that are inherently simple and require little or no training. To use the modern roundabout example again: people are initially confused because it looks complicated from the outside, but when you drive it, it's fairly difficult to mess it up.