Some days, I wonder whether the Cannonball Run — the unofficial and illegal road races from coast to coast using regular freeways and byways — have made Utah their new training grounds.
Pick any freeway or major highway along the Wasatch Front. Drive the speed limit. Then look in the rearview mirror. You’ll see them coming on all sides — cars and trucks going at least 20 mph faster than you are.
It reminds me of the old joke about the man who told police he was just trying to keep up with traffic. “But there is no traffic,” the officer said. To which the driver replies, “That shows just how far behind I am.”
Everyone seems determined to arrive first, wherever they’re going. Only it’s not funny.
A report this week from QuoteWizard was oddly satisfying in a told-you-so kind of way. Utah, it found, has the worst drivers in the nation.
You already knew that, right?
All those recent reports — a man who police say had four times the legal alcohol limit in his blood allegedly driving into a parade in Spanish Fork and hitting a horse, and a 19-year-old driver who allegedly laughed as police pulled him over after clocking him at 115 mph in Parleys Canyon, to name just two — lent an air of credibility to the Wild West nature of roadways in the Beehive State.
Except that it isn’t much better elsewhere.
And that’s especially true since the pandemic began.
This isn’t a new story. I’ve written several columns on the pandemic-related craziness of drivers. Some recent statistics indicate things are getting better. The National Safety Council said the death rate per 100 million vehicle miles driven in September was 1.49, compared to 1.51 in 2021. But it was still far above the 1.30 recorded in September 2019.
Why are speeding and COVID-19 related? Here’s one possible factor: The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety issued a report earlier this year that, among other things, looked at who stayed home and who kept driving when everything shut down in 2020. Turns out the people most likely to drive safely — older people and women, in particular — were the ones who stayed home. The more dangerous people drove more, and more dangerously.
Journalist Gersh Kuntzman, author of Streetsblog USA, noted that the people who drove more were also the cohort AAA showed to be twice as likely to text while driving, more than 44% more likely to speed on any street and 80% more likely to run red lights than the people who didn’t drive more during the pandemic.
And, of course, it’s a cohort in great supply in Utah.
Kuntzman notes that these figures still don’t explain why bad drivers became even more reckless. That might have to do with the perception that roads were emptier, so the dangers were fewer.
But that, in turn, doesn’t explain why highway deaths haven’t gone back to pre-2020 levels now that roads are crowded again.
By the way, Connecticut is supposed to have the safest drivers, according to QuoteWizard.
I think you should take that with a grain of salt. Just four years ago, a report by EverQuote labeled Connecticut the worst place to drive.
But then, that was based on data collected by the EverDrive app, which not everyone had, and which now no longer exists. The QuoteWizard figures, on the other hand, “analyzed over 10 million insurance quotes,” focusing on “accidents, speeding tickets, DUIs, and citations,” according to its website.
But even that report acknowledges, “No matter where a state ranks on our annual list of best and worst drivers, everyone thinks their state has the worst drivers in America.”
Your mileage, in other words, may vary.
Maybe our driving troubles are rooted in how we slap driver’s licenses into the hands of virtually any 16-year-old who can pass a simple test and demonstrate the ability to drive safely — at least while a test administrator is watching. Maybe it’s all too easy.
In that case, the eventual emergence of self-driving cars may be the only thing to save us from the daily Cannonball Run commute.