It’s Official: New York Drivers Are Better Than New Jersey AND California Drivers
Lisa Steuer McArdle
· 3 min read
Anyone who lives in
New York
or New Jersey knows that the two states have always had a bit of a rivalry. Apparently, this rivalry may date back to the 1700s, when New York and New Jersey fought over the placement of state lines.Now, hundreds of years later, New Yorkers can claim at least one victory over New Jersey. That’s because a new
Jerry
study indicates that New Yorkers are better drivers than New Jersey residents. 
Are New York drivers more aggressive?
New York residents, especially those who live in New York City, seem to have a reputation for being rude and aggressive drivers.
In fact, a survey by Affinion Group that came out more than 10 years ago voted New York as the U.S. city with the angriest and most aggressive drivers, according to
Reuters
. At the time, New Yorker city residents were cited as the angriest drivers because they supposedly tailgated, sped, honked their horns, and tended to lose their tempers and overreact.
Back then, talking on a cell phone was listed as a behavior that irked motorists the most—with 84% of people citing it as the behavior most likely to incite road rage.
To be fair, that survey looked at just New York City and not the whole state. So maybe New Yorkers have changed since then, or maybe New York City drivers don’t speak for the whole state.
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Comparing New York drivers
For Jerry’s study, we analyzed 574,303 quotes from east and west coast data from our more than 1 million car quote data points from July 2020 to July 2021.
According to the data, New Jersey drivers have 17% more violations than New York drivers.
In fact, the report indicates that 37% of New Jersey drivers have violations, compared to 20% of New Yorkers.
Interestingly, there was also a difference in the types of violations between the states. We found that the most popular violation for New Yorkers was failure to obey traffic signs. The other states—on both the east and west coast—were most often cited for speeding.
Other data about New York and other states
We also found that New York drivers had less violations than California drivers, too.
According to our data, 27% of California drivers have violations—slightly above New York’s 20%.
It’s also interesting to note that Massachusetts drivers have the least violations on average at 4% .
For a country-wide perspective, our data indicates that 27% of all drivers in the U.S. have violations.
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