Dave & Friends Variety Hour

Having contentedly lived the first 23 years of my life in States adjacent to Massachusetts, I grew up hearing about Massachusetts drivers. During my childhood in Connecticut, every vacation seemed to feature a daring and dangerous trip up I-91, I-95 or I-93 that provided me with a first-hand look at these infamous creatures and the opportunity to hear my father complain about their careless and aggressive driving habits. I learned that Boston was a place that one should avoid at all costs, an automotive jungle where barbarians and savages reign.

As is common both in Massachusetts and elsewhere, my parents taught me to drive during my teenage years. As I matured, I began driving through Massachusetts, and even into Boston from time to time. However, my interactions with Massachusetts drivers were limited, and I did not develop much of an opinion of their habits. I generally concluded that everyone I had heard complaining about Massachusetts drivers while I was growing up had been blowing things out of proportion. I conceded that Massachusetts drivers may be a little more aggressive and have a little less regard for traffic laws than those I was familiar with in bordering States, but the distinction did not seem as pronounced as I had been led to believe.

I graduated college in February of 2001 and decided to move to the Boston area. While I had my reservations about being a Bostonian, it seemed like a good place to find fulfilling work and connect with friends. Over the past five years, I have lived in Medford, Brookline and Cambridge, worked in Haverhill, Woburn, Southborough, Norwell and Lynn, and attended graduate classes in Salem. I have never been in a position in which my commute to work or class has been less than 30 minutes (without traffic). In addition, like most Americans, I am quite enamored of automotive travel, and take my car nearly everywhere I need or want to go.

Consequently, I have had ample opportunity to study Massachusetts drivers, and I have reached some important conclusions. To start with, I just want to establish that by and large, Massachusetts residents are bad drivers. Now, at this point I recognize that half my audience is indignantly saying, �I�m not. I�m a good driver.� However, I feel that seven years of driving primarily in Connecticut and Vermont, followed by five years of driving chiefly in Eastern Massachusetts qualifies me to make an objective judgment, and most Massachusetts residents drive poorly.

However, I am not writing this rant to simply confirm something that many New England residents already accept as fact. Rather, I wish to go a step further. I have concluded that there are three central reasons why Massachusetts drivers are so incompetent, and through revealing the fruits of my analysis, I hope to motivate change.

The first reason Massachusetts residents drive poorly is simply because they are not paying attention to what they are doing. I know, it sounds ridiculous that a very large percentage of Massachusetts drivers are not paying attention to an activity that involves operating a piece of $20,000-$60,000 machinery and preserving the lives of at least a few people, but it is true. As I sit in slowly moving traffic every afternoon on a major highway in Boston, I watch people swerve and slam on the breaks as they dial their cell phones, mess with their ipods and car stereos, feed their toddlers Cheerios, read the newspaper, rifle around for items in the glove compartment or on the floor, set up the DVD player for their kids and eat their fast food. It drives those of us who are actually paying attention to the road and trying to get where we are going insane. So, if you regularly do one of the things I have listed above, stop it.

The second reason Massachusetts drivers are so incompetent is they are consistently confronted with irregular, unsafe and changing road conditions. Construction is obviously a necessary aspect of road maintenance, but the level of continual construction that exists in Eastern Massachusetts is terribly unsafe. It constantly launches drivers into situations in which they are forced to contend with potholes, jersey barriers, the elimination of lanes, signs, signals and painted lines, and detours. Furthermore, just when one becomes accustomed to one construction situation, it changes. However, the problem is not just construction. Even when the roads are not under construction, they are a mess. The lanes are too narrow, the roads are often over capacitated, and the region is filled with awkward merges, blind intersections and unsafe rotaries. All of these problems make driving in Eastern Massachusetts difficult, and encourages drivers to be aggressive and make dangerous decisions just to get where they need to go.

The final reason why Massachusetts residents are bad drivers is weak traffic laws and poor law enforcement. Eastern Massachusetts is densely populated and the culture encourages overexertion. Consequently, Massachusetts drivers are always in a hurry to get where they are going and many are very aggressive and violate basic traffic laws. However, I do not necessarily consider this to be their fault when the law enforcement authorities do not seem to be making much of an effort to prevent such behavior. On a daily basis I watch drivers weaving in and out of lanes around other vehicles well above the speed limit, cutting off other drivers, traveling illegally in breakdown lanes, disobeying traffic signals, and generally expecting other vehicles to simply see them coming and get out of the way. These people are endangering themselves and everyone around them and elevating the accident rate in Massachusetts, and either the laws do not punish these reckless behaviors or the police are not properly enforcing the regulations. Given where things currently stand, one cannot expect Massachusetts residents to suddenly begin to drive safely when a disincentive for irresponsible driving does not exist.

Eastern Massachusetts is an unsafe and unpleasant place to drive. This is the result of an environment and the creatures it has reared. In order to change this situation, both the roads and the people need to change. Please consider the part you can play in this process.