I've spent the last couple of days dealing with car trouble. A car's failing alternator, & having to deal with the dealership trying to find a part, has delayed work & publishing of all things "Irrelevant & Crap" until tomorrow night.
While wasting moments of my life in a dealership waiting room, I decided to spend the time talking to my Mother on the cell. So with all that's happening & all the issues in the world, she wanted to talk about the price of gas, other drivers, and roads. It's an issue that probably resonates more on a local level, but if you wanna get "Mama Rimjob" pissed off, just ask her about the quality of roads. My home state of Tennessee is the only place I've ever lived where the solution to a pothole was to put a 5 inch thick metal plate on the problem for vehicles to drive over at 60 mph, so TDOT (Tennessee Department of Transportation) can take their sweet ass time to fix it.
So with that in mind, it gave me an idea for a topic. Which state has the worst drivers and/or roads?
God only knows how much money has been spent on the 3.9 million miles of American highway over the years. On the federal level, in 2005 Congress passed & the President signed into law a $286 billion transportation bill, which governs federal surface transportation spending through 2010. For all of that tax payer money, there was also 6,371 earmarks included. And even with what money goes toward highway improvement, the Department of Transportation was saying 3 years ago they needed $500 billion to deal with congestion & fix everything that's weathered & broken. Other estimates have put the cost of repair & modernization at $1.6 trillion.
Independent studies have found that only about a 1/3 of the nation's major urban roads are in what you would call good condition, with smooth pavement.
One of the major throughfares in the city of Memphis is Poplar Avenue. It's a six lane road that probably should only be four, but some idiotic civil engineer decided it was a good idea for cars to be stacked & packed, driving 6 inches apart at 45 mph along a horribly paved road. If that wasn't enough, when they expanded it to six lanes, they didn't make the road level with the drainage ditches. So, if you're in the right lane on either side of the road, about every 100 feet your car hits a TDOT made pothole that does wonders for the suspension & alignment. The unevenness of the road has been like this for over a decade, and of course most people drive in the middle & left lanes & hope there are no metal plates in those lanes covering the normal potholes.
In California, I always wonder about how the transportation funds are spent. I mean when you're trapped on the "405" for an hour & then pass Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) construction, where one guy is working & the other guys are watching him work, it can drive some insane. But we are talking about a state that's home to the eighth circle of Hell (also known as the California DMV), so nothing surprises.
Now to compound all of these shitty roads are the drivers who have no business driving any mechanized conveyance. I'm talking about the people who are too busy talking on the phone, the people reading papers on the steering wheel, and most importantly the people who have no comprehension of what the left & right lanes are for. There is a reason the left lane is colloquially known as the "fast lane", and not the "poking along & impeding traffic" lane.
Every year GMAC Insurance does a poll of the 50 states & the District of Columbia, to see how much licensed drivers know about general driving laws (e.g. what is the safe distance to maintain behind another car?). According to their latest survey of 5,524 licensed Americans released last month, the most knowledgeable drivers in the nation are in.....
- Minnesota
- Idaho
- Nebraska
- Wyoming
- Kansas
And the least knowledgeable?
- Georgia
- Massachusetts
- New York
- District of Columbia
- New Jersey
36.7 percent of New Jersey drivers failed the test, where only 5.7 percent of Kansas drivers did. Among the other results.....
Overall, findings from the 2008 survey indicate that an alarming number of licensed Americans continue to lack knowledge of basic rules of the road. While the national average score improved slightly to 78.1 percent (from 77.1 percent in 2007), in general, geographical regions ranked similarly to previous years, with the lowest average test scores in the Northeast. Across the board, respondents continued to have difficulty on questions about yellow lights and safe following distances. Eighty-four percent could not identify the correct action to take when approaching a steady yellow traffic light, and 73 percent could not properly identify a typical safe following distance from the car in front of them.
Of course, there is a flaw in this. Being able to pass the written test of a license exam, and actually driving a car can be two fundamentally different things.