Mass Drivers
I love my Massachusetts license plate. Not only is the red and white is a perfect contrast to my black Civic, but there’s just some kind of mystique for a NH born and raised person that driving around with a MA plate affords. Massachusetts drivers are widely acknowledged to be among the worst in the country. This is according to a multitude of official rankings. By the numbers, in a national test conducted by GMAC Insurance, Massachusetts drivers answered the third fewest number of correct questions (tied with New Jersey), and just ahead of Washington DC and Rhode Island; which, as everyone knows, is populated with people not smart enough to figure out how to live in Massachusetts, no one lives in Rhode Island because they want to- they just couldn’t think of anything else to do. In the National Safety Council’s “Chilling list of deadly states for youth-related driving fatalities” Massachusetts ranks second to worst. Most all other data on traffic safety and driving etiquette among states seems to hold the same opinion of our great Commonwealth. So driving around with a tag that identifies me as among the worst drivers in the country I feel gives me a free pass to make “mistakes”. I still work in New Hampshire and I can literally feel my ears burning when I cut someone off on the Spaulding turnpike, but you know what? It’s OK, because I’m from Massachusetts as my license plate will attest. I’m easily dismissed as just another masshole. It’s almost like having diplomatic immunity. I’m from Massachusetts and so I drive like it.
So why are Massachusetts drivers so bad? Are we somehow genetically inferior to the rest of the country? Is it our standards and benchmarks with relation to driver testing policy? No, we have very high standards when it comes to driver’s education and though the human genome project continues, no one has yet to identify the “poor driver gene”. So what is it? If it is not intrinsic, it must be extrinsic. That is to say, if we dismiss the nature of our beings as the cause of our accidents, it must be the nurture of our environment that makes us drive as such. I’ve got a couple of theories as to why this environment produces what the rest of the country considers to be “bad drivers”.
Problem number one has to do with the way the roads where originally laid out during colonial times. And if you look at the other states in the bottom percentile, (most all of them from the Northeast except Vermont which will be dealt with an another chapter) this colonial epimetheus style of roadway design speculation seems to be supported. It’s a well known fact that Boston roads are basically paved cow paths. They were literally the paths the cows used to walk between pastures, that beaten down over time became the travel roads between farmlands. When Boston moved from an agrarian based infrastructure to a more commercial economy, the roads were paved, but not redesigned, and certainly not straightened or directed with any forethought towards modern traffic patterns. The Big Dig has tried to address this, but there’s only so much you can do to redesign a city while it is moving. What they need to do is get all the people out (or not), level the place, then start over. They could design a nice grid system, give people enough room to make an exit without cutting off their neighbor and stop us from going out of our way due to the restrictions placed by those omnipresent “one way” signs. We would be able to take a real look at where we want to go and redirect traffic accordingly on roads that would support our desired flow of traffic. This advantage, of being able to learn from the mistakes made in the Northeast, is what makes the Southern and Western cities such a pleasure to drive in (Atlanta excluded, sorry, no excuse for you). Big cities that grew up in the post automobile advent era are much more sensitive to the needs of a mobile population. But alas, people in Massachusetts have to make due with what they have been inherited from their ancestors. We take the bad with the good I suppose.
Problem number two is the way we are directed to drive on said roads. The unofficial motto of the division of traffic engineering policy (known colloquially as “signs and lines”) seems to be “If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s your problem”. There is a lot that Massachusetts could do in the way of making their roads less confusing. Oh, there are signs here and there, but not where you need them and the ones that do exist typically do not offer too much in the way of useful information. The “Best Route to Logan Airport” campaign seems to be a good example of this. In the entire state, there three signs denoting the “Best Route to Logan Airport”, but I’m not sure who determined it was the best route, and it begs the question: who it is the best route for? The best route to Logan Airport, time wise, is straight down Route 1 to the Route 60 exit in Revere (then from there you are kind of on your own, but as long as you know where you are going you’ll be fine), but the “Best Route” signs take you down 128 up over to 93 then in through the city. Why would anyone want to go that way? It’s longer, more confusing and, not surprisingly, poorly marked. That is to say, if you were going by the “Best Route” way, you’d need a map anyhow, because they didn’t buy enough signs for all the turns. I think it might be the best route for people who don’t really need to get to Logan, or perhaps it passes a gas station owned by some relation at the DOT. Maybe that’s what really makes it the “Best Route”.
There are plenty of signs in Massachusetts telling you which way you can’t go, since most of the cow paths are too slender to allow for two way traffic, but very few, if any, signs tell you which way to go, once you’ve taken your initial turn. Try finding Fenway without the Citgo sign (thanks a million Venezuela). Again, I’ll acknowledge that there are exits with signs marked “Fenway Park”, but once you get off the exit, you’re left to make a series of chance left or right decisions, which inevitably leave you asking directions at some gas station, probably owned by a relation of some DOT official. This leaves a lot of confused and frustrated drivers confined to small spaces. And that’s not good for anyone.
So is there an upside to this? Well, I think there is. It is my supposition that having to rely on their perspicacity makes Massachusetts drivers among the smartest people in the country. Just as there are websites which rank Massachusetts drivers as the most dangerous in the country, there is an even greater number of websites that rank Massachusetts people as being among the smartest in the country. The average IQ in Massachusetts is 111 (second in the country), and all of the top five states (raked by IQ) are found in the Northeast. In fact, every single state in the entire Northeast ranked within the top 16 (if Maine and Vermont weren’t so busy smoking dope we’d be all top ten). It is almost an opposite list of the worst drivers in America. Could these two things be somehow inversely related? Sure we’re smart because we have some of the best schools in the country, but by virtue of being in Massachusetts, remember that these schools are run by Massachusetts drivers. I have concluded that driving with your wits, and constantly testing your memory and intuition must be good mental exercise. Whereas people who can practically sleep through their morning commute have no need to do anything aside from focus on talk radio, which we all know makes you not only numb, but also impotent. Drivers in Massachusetts need to be bold, they take calculated risks and must come up with creative solutions to meet their goals. All of these are positive attributes, which are clearly sharpened by driving on the worst roads in America.
