Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
A survey ranking Philly as the worst big city for drivers in the U.S. struck a nerve with Philadelphians last week \u2014 the nerve in our eye that\u2019s still twitching because of some road raging jabroni on the Schuylkill<\/a>.<\/p>\n The WalletHub survey<\/a> scored cities based on factors like commute times and gas prices, and while those things contribute to what it\u2019s like to drive around here, it\u2019s not what I think of when I think of bad Philly driving. I think of the visceral experiences that make me scream \u201cWhat the actual [colorful string of expletives] dude?!?\u201d at least seven times a week.<\/p>\n I think of the guy who cut across three lanes of traffic on Callowhill Street in front of me last week to make a left on a red light. Or the trash truck I saw completely blow a light on Fifth Street. Or the time a dad and his elementary school-age son both flipped me off on I-95<\/a> because I was driving too slow (i.e., 15 miles over the speed limit).<\/p>\n These are the things I want to commiserate about with my fellow Philly drivers (and pedestrians and cyclists). These are the things I want to name so we can denounce and shame those who make our city a more dangerous place. So I came up with my own list of peeves to share and I put the question<\/a> out on social media<\/a>: \u201cWhat are the worst habits you see or the worst thing you\u2019ve ever seen driving in Philly?\u201d<\/p>\n 1) Mixed signals<\/p>\n Sometimes I think back to my early days of driving in Philly, when people who didn\u2019t use their turn signals<\/a> were my biggest pet peeve. Ah, I was as green as a go light in those days! While other dangerous roadway practices have superseded this one on my list, I remain absolutely flabbergasted at how many licensed motorists don\u2019t seem to know what that little lever on the left of their steering wheel does. I\u2019ve become so used to having to guess where people are going, I actually get excited when I see someone use their blinker now.<\/p>\n 2) Double trouble<\/p>\n It takes a substantial amount of gall to block a lane of vehicular or bicycle traffic while you double park your car to go run in and do something. What are you doing? Nobody knows! But it\u2019s obviously more important than whatever everybody else has to do.<\/p>\n It takes even more hubris to double park your car right next to an open space, or to park it in the middle of a one-lane street<\/a>, and yet, it happens all the time in Philly. So much so that we don\u2019t even honk at the people who do it anymore. We\u2019ve just resigned ourselves to this double parking bind. <\/p>\n When I was covering the Philadelphia Parallel Parking Association Championships<\/a> recently, which aims to promote better parking practices in the city, a spectator near me was asked by a Visit Philly staffer what the litmus test is for earning your driving stripes in Philly.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not a true Philly driver until you\u2019ve double parked for at least an hour,\u201d the spectator said, as I held back tears and died a little inside.<\/p>\n 3) Hard pass<\/p>\n Something I first noticed during the pandemic, and have seen pick up exponentially in the years since, are drivers who use turn lanes as passing lanes. I see this most often at stoplights. A driver who\u2019s five cars back at a red light sees an empty turn lane, goes into it, and when the light turns green they step on the gas and pass the cars going straight. Way to go buddy! You really got one over on all of us. See you in about 20 seconds at the next red light. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve also seen drivers using center dividing lanes as passing lanes (and as parking lanes in South Philly, of course). Folks on social media also bemoaned drivers who pass on the shoulder as well as in bike and parking lanes. This is not just a gross and incredibly self-serving practice, it\u2019s incredibly dangerous too. I\u2019d excommunicate everybody who does it if I could. <\/p>\n 4) Video-no<\/p>\n Texting while driving is terribly unsafe and also illegal but sadly, it\u2019s nothing new. What I have noticed more recently \u2014 and others have too<\/a> \u2014 is people watching videos while they\u2019re driving. I can\u2019t even believe I had to write that sentence it\u2019s such a stupid thing to do, but here we are living in a society where a large chunk of the citizenry has the attention span of a tsetse fly and absolutely no self-awareness. <\/p>\n Just this year, I had an Uber driver who had one phone in his center console for directions and another one attached to the vent on the left of his steering wheel that he was watching videos on. I wanted to say something but by the time I noticed what was happening we were on the highway and I saw he was watching videos of Vladimir Putin. It was a Catch-22 in terms of personal safety calls.<\/p>\n 5) Philautobahn<\/p>\n Nobody goes the speed limit here. It\u2019s a suggestion limit. And you know what Philadelphians don\u2019t take kindly to? Suggestions and limits. Even school buses will pass you if you go 55 on 95. <\/p>\n God forbid you have to use a spare tire and can\u2019t go above 50. You\u2019re going to feel like Mr. Magoo driving a jalopy at the Indy 500. <\/p>\n What\u2019s really terrifying is when you\u2019re going 15 mph above the speed limit to keep up with the flow of traffic and someone comes flying by doing at least 30 mph more than you. People don\u2019t even honor construction zone speed limits. There\u2019s currently active construction on several parts of 95 where the speed limit is 45 mph, and nobody is going below 60. I fear for the lives of those workers every day.<\/p>\n 6) Stop at nothing<\/p>\n The worst Philly drivers treat stop lights<\/a> like stop signs and treat stop signs<\/a> like yield signs, if they acknowledge them at all. I bet they\u2019re on their way to do something important like cracking the secret to cold fusion!<\/p>\n These terrible drivers will also honk at you for stopping at a yellow light and honk at you for not going through a red light before it turns green. And if you dare use a stop sign<\/a> as intended, well you best be prepared for their wrath then too. <\/p>\n One of the most mind-baffling things is when some idiot driver beeps at you for letting people cross the street. I\u2019m sorry, sir, I don\u2019t want to kill or maim people today, or any day. I didn\u2019t think of how that would affect your commute before I went on the road. How selfish of me! <\/p>\n 7) U really did that<\/p>\n Sometimes you\u2019ll be driving along in the left lane, say on Broad Street, when a motorist in the right lane suddenly decides that they need to go in the other direction. Without using their blinker to warn you (see the first item on this list) they make a random U-turn<\/a> in front of you and into opposing traffic. This is a move I call the \u201cF\u201d U-turn because that\u2019s exactly what the driver is saying to everyone else around them.<\/p>\n 8) Drive time<\/p>\n Roosevelt Boulevard may get all the glory when it comes to the worst Philly road for driving, but don\u2019t sleep on Kelly and Lincoln Drives. Seriously, don\u2019t sleep on them because despite being beautiful, they\u2019re incredibly dangerous thanks to the people who drive on them like they\u2019re in Grand Theft Auto.<\/p>\n Not only do these two winding roads have more twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan movie, the posted speed limit on them is 25 mph. You\u2019d never know that though as you\u2019re passed in a snowstorm by drivers doing 55 mph.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing quite like hitting Kelly Drive for the first time. It\u2019s like you\u2019re plopped down into a Mario Kart track in a beautiful gorge but you\u2019re fighting for your life trying to survive as everyone goes twice the speed limit,\u201d Paul Spencer of Rittenhouse Square said on Bluesky<\/a>.<\/p>\n But just because someone drives fast does not mean they drive well, as Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow of Germantown<\/a> wisely pointed out on Threads<\/a>. Many of the people who hit Kelly and Lincoln Drives like they were race tracks \u201ccan\u2019t stay inside a lane or maneuver the curves,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min A survey ranking Philly as the worst big city for drivers in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,126823],"class_list":["post-309838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philly-worst-city-driving-parking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}