According to a survey put out by the insurance industry, Rhode Island was in last place for the last 2 years, but upon making the test harder and asking more behavioral questions, NY, NJ, DC, and MA all scored worse this year. I always wondered how the Massholes could be better than RI. Not that RI is any picnic, mind you. MD does not hold a candle to New England for idiocy on the road.

But the real sucks to be you news? VA (#41 / 51) scored far worse than MD (#25 / 51). It’s all you Yankee transplants down in the NoVa area, I say. But hey, at least y’all still managed to beat West Virginia. By two places.

HTML won't work, here's the link:

http://www.i-go-cars.com/autos/gmac-insurance-study-says-36-million-americans-unfit-to-drive

I concur about Maryland drivers. Bahstahn drivers you can count on to drive the wrong way on a one way street. New Yorkers (the city) -- just drive aggressively and assume the other drivers will as well (and don't drive a car you care about).

Southerners all think they're driving at a NASCAR race. Out in the Pacific Northwest they are all polite -- to a fault at times.

DC is bad, just not quite as bad as Maryland.

I had a look at that survey and I'm not sure I'd pass it, given that the questions seem to contain a lot of those "how many feet" nuggets that you memorize for your driver's exam and promptly forget afterwards.

It's true that there are lots of bad drivers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic (including Virginia). But most of this bad driving is over-aggressiveness. Although I don't like it, I can deal with it - with an aggressive driver, you at least have some instinctive sense of what he's going to do next.

The trouble with Murrlanders is that their driving technique is simply divorced from reality. And it's this absolute unpredictability that gives me the willies. Could be anybody - a little old lady duffing along at 15 mph or some dude lane-surfing in his Pontiac. If they've got Maryland plates, you simply cannot know what's coming next.

Yeah, the GMAC survey has to be taken with a grain of salt - I'm not sure that some of the behavioral questions are fair. I was just pulling your chain. But I've lived in VA and I've lived in Western MD (round about Antietam), and I now live in CT. When I was a kid, we used to complain about WVA and Baltimore drivers. VA didn't enter the picture, and native Marylanders probably remember the "Please Drive Gently" signs that used to sit on the MD side of every bridge over the Potomac.

But MD and VA drivers have changed since I lived there, and I seriously do blame it on the out-of-state tranaplants moving into government jobs in that area.

For sheer unpredictability, RI has any state I've ever driven in beat, followed closely by NJ. MA drivers tend to come in only the too slow or too fast flavors. But the NE is the worst area I've ever driven in. I blame a lot of it on city dwellers who get no practice and only take the car down from Boston or up from NY once or twice a month.

John, having lived in New Hampshire and DC, I can tell you that DC area drivers are far worse than Boston drivers. And Robbo is correct that in this region, the Maryland drivers are the worst.

Out in the Pacific Northwest they are all polite -- to a fault at times.

Guilty as charged. I've spent a minute or more at a 4-way stop sign ding the hand-gesture "No, please -- after you" argument with a fellow Oregonian who came to a stop milliseconds before I did.

Sadly, in our larger cities, I am starting to see -- and mimic -- more aggressive behavior on the road. But for the most part, what rbj says is true, and not just on our roads.