Yahoo Finance New York City Is Home to the World's Best Drivers
New York has always been invoked as a place that is contrary to the rest of the nation. Rude and arrogant, liberal and money grubbing, lawless and scary, crowded and mad. Contrary.
Well, how's this for contrarian? Put aside politics and consider instead the art of driving. Those in the heartland love to drub New York drivers, but they're dead wrong. New York City has the best drivers in the world.
I'm serious.
I moved to the big city 20 years ago from New Mexico, thinking I could handle any terrain. After all, I could ably negotiate a backcountry track scratched into the side of a desert butte, but Manhattan's canyons presented a different kind of scramble. One that I was unequal to. I parked my manually-equipped coupe in a corner of Brooklyn and put my feet and the subway to use instead. (Still the best way around the city, not so incidentally.)
But I love to drive, and I wasn't going to give it up. New York natives are the exception - most the rest of us came from someplace else, where we got a driver's license in our teens. Then we had to learn to drive all over again, but in the manner of this rude, arrogant, lawless and utterly fabulous city. NYC streets are a crucible, if you're willing to jump into the fire.
It took years to discover their joys. (It's not that you need to drive in NYC, but it's a glory to realize that you're up to the task.) I came to understand that every deadlocked artery was an opportunity to triumph, even if only for the chance to outwit the cabbies and sneak forward three car lengths. I thrilled in the glorious free-for-all that is the West Side Highway. I learned to interpret their honking beats and engine-gunning rhythms, where quick off-the-line starts and fearlessness are key.
If you can drive in New York City, you can drive anywhere.
Most importantly, I learned that I was sharing the roads with many of the most capable and unflappable drivers you'll find anywhere. If you can drive in New York City, you can drive anywhere.
To make it here, you have to be king of your vehicle. You've gotta know your vehicle's clearances down to the millimeter, so you can skim through the slimmest gaps. (How cute, our mirrors just kissed!) Be so confident as to never hesitate, but also be aware of all things around you-on your sides and rear, especially. You must exist in an a state of free-flowing consciousness, mind clear, and allow your vehicle to become a current in the water, slip-streaming past the double-parked FedEx trucks, around gaping potholes and to always, always avoid the oblivious pedestrians.
Manhattan is laid out as a grid, easy to understand. But those one-way, dead-straight streets are explosions of bombastic bustle. A feeding frenzy of yellow taxis and black livery SUVs whose livelihoods, like petrol-fed sharks, depend on never stopping. The panel trucks and bike messengers who duel against one another, brawn versus bravado. (In a clever book of quotes, Taxi Driver Wisdom, one hack summed up the two-wheeled kamikazes thusly: "Bike messengers, they search for death.") There are the harried Thai deliverymen astride tatty mopeds and the irksome New Jersey commuters in their leased ML 350s and those damn MTA city buses, lumbering giants that take up too much space and which most New Yorkers never, ever use.
And that's only the people that are (probably) licensed to use the streets. New York streets are actually owned by the pedestrians, imperious and impervious to crosswalks and common sense. On foot, it is our given right to stride across any avenue, no matter how busy, and to look affronted at the sudden screech of brakes. (Giuliani's effort to ticket jaywalkers was met with a classic NYC fuhgetaboutit scorn.)
But what's really amazing about NYC motorists is that nobody shares the same background. New York is a constrained space in which we all learn to navigate together, from the Ghanaian cab driver to the bike deliveryman from Shandong to the former Minnesotan who garages his old Subaru up in Washington Heights. All speak strange dialects, but there's a common understanding and the one golden rule: "I am merging into that space, right now, and you will let me. Otherwise, we crash."
And it works. Unlike in, say, Los Angeles, where the rule is to intentionally block someone trying to change lanes, New Yorkers will automatically cede just enough room to let you in. That's what keeps the rivers flowing as well as they do. It's the thing that out-of-towners don't understand, and the biggest motoring mistake you can make. When fifteen lanes merge into two, as they do onto a bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel, you take turns merging. But any pause (or, god forbid, refusal to allow the next car or truck into his rightful place) will strangle the flow.
When an out-of-towner screws up that rule, we'll helpfully and volubly let them know. Horn use is also an art. Please understand that the Delhi deliveryman and the Peruvian in the plumbing van have no issues with each other: They fret over the rubbernecker from Teaneck, New Jersey, in for a Broadway musical matinee.
And it's not like the city's planners make it easy for us. We deal with a road network that is positively third world. Only in New York would you place a massive plate of slick steel, in winter, over a stretch of potholed street and proclaim it temporarily fixed, an impromptu skid pad for the unwary.
Thus it makes a fine place for carmakers to discover any deficiencies in their models' manufacture, akin to an urban Nurburgring where three blocks equal three miles. NYC's pitted and crater-ized infrastructure pops BMW tires and bends oversized rims with spectacular efficiency. There's good reason that we'll go out of way to hail an aged but bullet-proof Crown Vic taxi over the failed, sagging suspension of a newly converted Maxima.
You may argue that this urban theater only prepares you for one type of driving, and I'll concede that a local who lives on the Amalfi Coast or just off Mulholland will have a better handle on the twisties. And I don't know any native Manhattanites who are successful racecar drivers.
But I've exported my Big Apple lessons to Rome and Beijing and Sao Paulo, and those roads fazed me not. The skills translate.
My fellow citizens are not, sadly, like the denizens of Detroit or Munich or Maranello. I wish they were, but it is not to be. These mad motorists rarely obsess, covet, understand, or even love the automotive world like drivers in other, gentler places. But when it comes to game of millimeters-and a cold and fearless heart in the face of all that bombastic, beeping bustle-you're simply not going to beat a New Yorker.
