Courteous? Not drivers around Atlanta

Survey says we are No. 1 in several sins of the road

By KEN SUGIURA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/14/08

Driving too fast, tailgating, making cell phone calls while driving, making obscene gestures to other drivers. According to a national survey, no one does these things more than metro Atlanta drivers.

Those were the findings of a 2,500-person survey that deemed Atlanta the sixth-least courteous driving city in the U.S. Miami achieved the three-peat in the third survey performed for AutoVantage, an auto club.

Following Miami were: Boston, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

"The joke that we have is that there's too many people watching Nascar," said Freeland Abbott, an Athens resident who has a round-trip commute of 136 miles that he makes four days a week.

Atlanta jumped six spots from last year in the 25-city survey, in which about 100 drivers in each of the cities were surveyed by phone.

In the survey, 11 percent of Atlanta drivers said they drive too closely to the car in front of them, the highest percentage of all drivers surveyed. Also, Atlanta drivers ranked first among all cities in confessing to the following car sins:

• driving a lot faster than they should every day (22 percent);

• talking every day on the cellphone while driving (35 percent);

• making an obscene gesture at another driver in the last month (14 percent).

Abbott's personal pet peeve is drivers who cut into his lane when they don't have enough space. As a result, Abbott said he honks his horn in anger and warning more in Atlanta than he did when he lived in Boston.