Which City Has the Worst Drivers?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 03.31.06 | 1:45 AM ET
Is it Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Kuwait City? Rome? Los Angeles? London Times correspondent Chris Ayres devotes his latest So L.A. blog entry to his opinion on the subject. “[T]his week I returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city whose entire population seems to be trying to break the land speed record in a 1984 Renault 9 GLS,” he writes. “And I concluded that the lapses of concentration demonstrated by motorists in Los Angeles is far preferable to the sociopathic stare of the average Porteno cab driver, who considers it his duty to accelerate towards stationary objects (including human beings) at double the speed limit, before averting multiple homicide by stomping on the brakes or swerving violently.” Sounds horrible, but I’m going the other way on this. I’ve seen some dreadful drivers here in Los Angeles. Just tonight, for instance, I was traveling a busy two-lane street when the guy in front of me swerved into the oncoming lane and stopped cold, just to drop off his passengers. No hazards. No signal. No brain.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Chris 03.31.06 | 7:26 AM ET
I thought the drivers in Buenos Aires were the worst until I got to Saudi Arabia where they are shockingly bad. They are a greater threat than the religious fanatics!
Ben 03.31.06 | 11:04 AM ET
I laughed aloud when I read the bit about the speeding Renaults: That’s definitely Buenos Aires. Apparently not everything has changed since I lived there in 1999.
Chuck 03.31.06 | 3:38 PM ET
Rome, Beijing, Los Angeles: all cities with seemingly horrific drivers. And yet there’s an orderliness and specific system the traffic and pedestrians follow and understand (though visitors may not). Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on the other hand, not only has the most aggressive drivers (they straddle both lanes, lest someone wishes to pass) and highest drunk driving fatalities (the police can’t arrest drunk drivers if EVERYONE appears to be driving drunk), the busses (in most places believed to be arbiters of civilization) play chicken down busy boulevards, plowing through crosswalks, yellow-cum-red lights, and even cutting each other off at bustling bus stops with people in and around each bus. Truly a recipe for madness.
Charly 04.01.06 | 7:46 PM ET
Well, Im not sure if the worst driver are here. Im sure that is not a better driving place, but…Do you saw cab drivers at nigth in Paris? Or, do you visted Rio?
The comment about RENAULT 84 GLS is so malicious. There are not taxis from this year in BA. I smell some despective sense in this article.
Tom 04.03.06 | 8:54 AM ET
The drivers on the Arabian Gulf are, hands down, the worst in the world. You take your life into your hands when you go on the streets in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar.
Dany 05.23.06 | 12:21 AM ET
You guys havent seen anything until you’ve been to Miami. Here, red lights and speeding limits have no meaning. At any stoplight, you will never fail to see at least 2 people take the red.