D.C. ranks No. 5 when it comes to road rage

A new AutoVantage Road Rage Survey ranks the D.C. area No. 5 when it comes to rude drivers, as first reported by The Washington Examiner.

Miami was the least courteous, followed by Boston, New York and Baltimore.

You can get the most courteous driving experience in Pittsburgh, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Minneapolis and Cleveland.

The District is the No. 1 place for drivers to slam on their brakes at the last possible second. Forty percent of drivers see this every day.

Here are some of the other key findings of the survey:

• Younger drivers with the longest commutes are most likely to react to an aggressive or rude driver. Those with the longest drives are the most likely to make an obscene gesture.
• Men and women react the same ways when it comes to road rage.
• Road-rage inducing behaviors that commuters see every day include talking on the cell phone (88 percent), driving too fast (59 percent) and tailgating (56 percent).
• Eating and/or drinking, a common road rage trigger, is seen by 49 percent of drivers daily. Motorists in Baltimore, New York and Tampa (57 percent) see this daily.
• The most text-message happy drivers are in Denver, Houston, Miami and Phoenix, although overall 38 percent of commuters see texting every day.
• Twenty nine percent of those surveyed say they see drivers multi-tasking by putting on makeup, shaving or reading while driving. They say they see it most often in Tampa (40 percent) and least often in Cincinnati (20 percent).

To get the survey results, Prince Market Research, an independent marketing research company, conducted 2,512 interviews between Feb. 4 and March 23. The survey has a margin of error of 2 percent.

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