A few times each year, we run “Great Job, Milwaukee!” (or sometimes “Great Job, Wisconsin!”) articles that congratulate our region for appearing on listicles that are whipped together by, like, insurance companies or landscaping businesses or whatever. Sometimes our inclusion on such lists is well-deserved. Other times, it’s a bit of stretch but still nice to be recognized. And every now and then, we feel that a click-soliciting “study” misses the mark so much that we need to acknowledge it. Get ready to read about one that lands firmly in that third camp.
Last month, something called Lemon Law Experts released a report that deemed Milwaukee to have the second-least annoying drivers in America. To clarify, they reached this conclusion when they surveyed drivers from the 40 largest U.S. cities “and asked a variety of questions about the behaviors they see while driving, what they are guilty of, and more.” When the digital dust settled, Milwaukee’s driving annoyance total was a shocking 39th out of 40 cities.
In this study, Milwaukee (a.k.a. a place where traffic lights are apparently optional, the home of the “Milwaukee Slide,” and a place littered with semi-devouring bridges) amassed an “Annoying Driver Score” of 68.50 out of a possible 100. Of the 40 major cities surveyed, only Minneapolis’ “Annoying Driver Score” of 63.01 ranked lower. The score was tabulated by averaging the city’s “Aggressive Driver Score” (54.58), “Reckless Driver Score” (72.41), and “Distracted Driver Score” (77.08). Then rounding up from 68.01677777 to 68.50 for some reason? Don’t bother crunching the numbers, we know you’re probably reading this while driving in a bike lane.
So what cities are somehow worse than Milwaukee? Well, the top five most-annoying metros on the list are Miami, Las Vegas, Nashville, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Somehow, Chicago wound up at a respectable 15th, New York is 17th, and Boston (the single most annoying city we’ve ever driven in) can be seen way down at 34th.
You can check out the full list below and read more about this “study” here. So, uh, great job, Milwaukee, we guess. We’re honestly not sure how it’s possible, but apparently drivers can somehow get a lot worse than they are here.
