Just how bad are New York drivers?
If you're hearing a lot of complaints from delivery drivers about bad motorist behavior, don't assume they're just being cranky. Their gripes might be legitimate—particularly if those drivers work in and around New York City.
A recent study by researchers at New York University (NYU) and vehicle intelligence platform provider Dash offers some insights into bad driving behaviors in the New York metro area, one of the country's biggest markets. For the study, researchers from NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management analyzed anonymized data collected by Dash's telematics platform, Chassis, to document what really happens when drivers hit the road. Key findings included the following:
- Speeding is most common along the Henry Hudson Parkway on Manhattan's Upper West Side, although the Belt Parkway, Gowanus Parkway, and Brooklyn Queens Expressway also see their share of speeders
- Hard braking events, which are also linked to unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists, are concentrated in downtown and midtown Manhattan, as well as downtown Brooklyn
- 92 percent of drivers operating on streets with 50 mph speed limits late at night were driving above that posted speed limit.
In addition to providing a heads-up to harried delivery drivers, the study could have implications for urban transportation policy, especially when it comes to improving planners' understanding of how drivers interact with their built environments, researchers said. "Traditional traffic policies are based on spot measurements that often do not show the entire picture," Sarah M. Kaufman, assistant director of the Rudin Center, said in a statement. "However, Dash provides a platform for gathering and developing a policy around actual driver behavior, not only what is assumed and expected."
The full report, which includes heat maps showing where speeding and hard-braking events are most likely to occur, is available online. You can read it here.
Watch this video to learn how Dash is connecting cars to mobile phones to improve driving.
And here's a classic New York City traffic moment from cinema:
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