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Everyone who has been driving long enough has felt like the lone wise driver in an ocean of freaks. In one research confirming our tendency to overestimate our own driving skills, 70.1 percent of drivers declared that they were better-than-average drivers – a statistical improbability. While it is easy to understand why most motorists may observe themselves as above average, it is less easy to determine if they are correct.
Luckily, the world web has given drivers a public forum to air their sorrows. While in a previous era, the screams of baffled motorists were often lost amidst an ocean of honks and idling motors, today’s drivers can memorialize their criticisms on the internet for all of posterity. With the ending data, analysts can now clarify the question, so many frustrated United States drivers have asked themselves after getting tailgated, cut off, or sped past by a sports automobile – are these the worst motorists in the country, or what?
To figure out which U.S. states and cities are home to the worst motorists, The Clunker Junker analyzed thousands of tweets from across the United States to tell where drivers have the most negative things to know about fellow drivers.
The Clunker Junker studied over 250 thousand driving-related tweets from across the nation encompassing the word “drivers” accompanied by each U.S. state’s name (or demonym), the top 100 cities in the United States, and a list of the top car brands. They then evaluated the sentiment of each tweet by applying an AI algorithm from HuggingFace and ranked cities, states, and car brand names based on the percentage of driving-related tweets with a negative sentiment. To find out which U.S. state has the worst drivers, The Clunker Junker examined for tweets containing each U.S. state’s name or demonym followed by “drivers” (for instance, “New Yorker drivers” or “New York drivers”). To get city-level data, the same search was carried out, but with the names of the top 100 American cities in the U.S. by population (“San Francisco drivers”). The brand-level data was collected by retrieving tweets with the brand name accompanied by “driver” or “drivers” while also being geolocated on the roads of the top 300 American cities by population in the United States. They limited accounts to a maximum of one tweet per day to account for bots. Also, to provide further variability, only up to a total of ten tweets were recognized from the same account. The team then analyzed each tweet sentiment using an AI algorithm from HuggingFace, which provided them to get the probability of a tweet being negative. A tweet was acknowledged as negative if its possibility of being negative was higher than 50 percent. Finally, they determined the percentage of negative tweets in each geolocation to determine which has the worst motorists.
Which U.S. States are home to the worst drivers?
Over 40 million people are pulled over for traffic violations in the United States every year. We’ve all seen our fair share of terrible drivers, but which states are home to the worst? According to almost 250 thousand Tweets, people criticize most of their fellow drivers in Rhode Island. 71% of posts about the standard of driving in the state include a negative sentiment, slightly higher than Mississippi (70.6%).
The top 20 U.S. cities with the worst drivers
There are over 280 million cars registered in the United States, and with 83% of the population now living in urban areas, there are bound to be a few terrible drivers around. After analyzing posts from almost 250,000 motorists, we found that two cities in Arizona, Tucson, and Glendale have the worst reputation. 75.6% of tweets about driving in both cities contain negative sentiments. Houston, TX – a city with notorious traffic congestion, is 3rd, with a negativity rate of 75.1%.
The top 10 car brands with the worst drivers in the United States
BMW drivers reign supreme, with 58% of posts about the Bavarian brand containing negative sentiment. American motorists also dislike Nissan (57.3%), Dodge (55.8%), and Infiniti (55.3%) drivers.
Key findings
The U.S. state with the worst motorists is Rhode Island. On Twitter, 71.02% of tweets about the Ocean State are negative.
Many of the American states with the worst driver reputations have fast-growing communities and rising traffic congestion. In 6 of the 10 states with the worst driver reputations, the average travel time to work increased faster than the United States average from 2016 to 2020.
A bulk of the 20 American cities with the worst driver reputations are in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Urban traffic congestion may raise the negative perception of other motorists. Houston and Miami rank as having the 8th most hours lost because of traffic congestion of any city and rank as having the third and fourth worst drivers.
Luxury sports car brands like BMW, Maserati, Lamborghini, and Mercedes have some of the worst motorists’ reputations.
