Weblogs: Off Beat by Jack Perry

03:09 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Gun-toting Geminis from Miami are the most dangerous drivers on the road, but unarmed Capricorns from Minneapolis are the safest.

I know. It's repetitious to refer to Miami drivers as "gun-toting," but this conclusion on national driving trends is nevertheless true. It says so on the Web -- at least if you read the right combination of reports into the popular topic of bad road behavior.

The Web is full of information about bad driving and road rage, information that could come in handy as millions of Americans take to the highways to battle it out this Memorial Day weekend. A lot of people have tried to figure out why we drive like nuts and how to stop it, but we're apparently all too busy talking on our cell phones to pay attention.

What is it about getting behind the wheel that transforms so many of us into road warriors? Is it the power of 8 cylinders under the hood of an SUV. Hey, if you're driving a tank, you might as well act like GI Joe.

Is it uncomfortable seats? Bad music on the car radio?

Outside of bitter divorces or youth sporting events, are people this rude to each other in an other areas of life? Do we flip off each other in the supermarket checkout lane, cut off each other in the frozen food section, hurl eggs and at each other after a collision in the dairy section.

And despite the scratched and dented evidence to the contrary, none of us is a bad driver. It's never our fault. We're all Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man. "I'm an excellent driver," we say as we roll over our neighbor's marigolds on the way to work.

If so many of us are such good drivers, why all the problems? Is it linked to geography? Climate? Sun signs? Ammunition?

The results of a driving survey released recently last week caught a lot of attention. The survey, commissioned by a car club, interviewed more than 2,000 commuters and concluded that drivers in steamy Miami were the most likely to get hot under the hood. They were ranked as the rudest and most prone to road rage.

On the other side of the street, drivers in Minneapolis apparently manage to stay as cool as their weather. They ranked as the most courteous. Who knows? Maybe it's just more difficult to give somebody the finger when you're wearing mittens.

The survey managed to enrage some drivers in Boston, who finished as the fifth rudest. They were upset, not because they were so high on the road-rage scale, but because they weren't ranked high enough.

BostonHerald.com reacted with this headline: "Hub driving stunner: Not so rude after all"

And this lead on the story: "Hey all you $&*#@ Boston drivers: Stop being so #%$@& nice."

The story quotes a school teacher saying, “We really are No. 1 - it’s just that they’re so afraid to (bleep) off Boston drivers, they put us at No. 5.”

He might be right.

Providence apparently wasn't in the survey, which ranked 20 major metropolitan areas, but Boston drivers should know that they have nothing on their neighbors from the Ocean State.

Downtown Providence is a place where nobody's car has a blinker, stop lights aren't even treated as recommendations, and drivers apparently consider speeding up or swerving toward street-crossing pedestrians a favorite sport.

If you're that unlucky pedestrian trying to cross Fountain Street (like us here at projo.com), you'd better hope that the driver drifting in your direction isn't a Gemini, according to more information on the Web.

In trying to solve the mystery of bad driving (and, I assume, save money) , an Australian financial services company went as far as studying the Sun signs of drivers involved in 160,000 accident claims over a three-year period.

The study concluded that the worst drivers were Geminis, while the best were Capricorns.

The company's national manager of personal insurance noted that Geminis are typically described as "restless, easily bored and frustrated by things moving slowly."

Still, knowing what we do about the twins, couldn't a Gemini be the best and worst driver on the same five-minute trip to the store?

To warn other drivers, should we post "Gemini on Board" signs in cars?

According to yet another study, you might also want to give extra room to the guy in the pickup truck with the gun rack, if you don't do this already.

An article in New Scientist Magazine points to a Harvard School of Public Health survey showing "that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists without guns."

You wouldn't think you'd need the Harvard School of Public Health to tell you that. After all, if you feel like GI Joe driving an SUV, just think of how you feel if you're in an SUV, and you're packing heat.

So wouldn't you rather ride with an unarmed Capricorn in Minnesota than a gun-toting Gemini in Miami -- except maybe in February?

-- projo.com staff writer Jack Perry takes this occasional light-hearted look at the news -- that is, when he's not navigating the roads between the Cape and Providence.