[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.