Allstate has declared Austin drivers to be the worst drivers in the USA. Well, maybe not the worst, but the most likely to get into an accident. The national average is one accident every ten years. In Austin, it’s one accident every seven point four years. Color me totally unsurprised.

Though the people they talked to in the news bit I just saw were trying to blame our roadways, I have witnessed enough automobile accidents and enough stupid drivers in this town to say it isn’t so much the roads as the brain-dead drivers. Making an educated guess, after a lifetime of dealing with the stupid drivers in Austin, I’d say the number one cause of accidents here is not leaving a safe following distance between cars. I have never seen so many people so eager to be inches from someone else’s bumper while doing 80 miles and hour anywhere else I have ever driven. I wish I were kidding about the “inches,” but I am not. They want to be close enough to my tailgate to microscopically view the bugs on my license plate.

I do my best to keep a safe stopping distance between me and the car in front of me, but there isn’t anything I can do about the morons behind me. Except annoy them, of course, and I do my best to annoy them. If they want to drive so close to the back end of my truck I can see the crumbs falling off their breakfast bagel, they can go around and tailgate someone else. So, I slow down. By “slow down” I mean to the speed limit, because that’s the other main cause of wrecks in Austin: never, ever driving the speed limit.

A few miles an hour over, I don’t mind. I do mind everyone on the road insisting we should all be doing twenty miles an hour over, and they want to do this on side streets as well as the highways. I haven’t noticed this quite as much lately, because I think most people are starting to clue in that they get better gas mileage if they slow down and at least drive the speed limit.

But the tailgating? It’s as bad or worse than ever. I’d think drivers on Austin’s major roadways would know tailgating is a bad idea, seeing as they all slow down to a crawl to gape at every single little accident they pass. Aside from one t-bone wreck at an intersection I saw last year, every other wreck has been a double fender-bender with one car getting smashed between the person they were tailgating and the person who was tailgating them. But no. Austin drivers can apparently gape at wrecks all day every day and not put two and two together.

So yeah, color me totally unsurprised Austin drivers get into more wrecks than anyone else. They don’t know how to drive.