Does Your City Have the Nicest Drivers?

With an average of 31.7 million cars on the road in the UK alone and the number increasing every year, driving is clearly a necessity for many people. However, it can make a big difference to your driving experience if your journey has nice drivers or selfish ones.

So, whereabouts in the UK would be the best place to drive, with the nicest drivers on the roads? And which places should we mentally prepare ourselves before we drive through, with the least nice drivers?

Here at Peter Vardy, we thought we’d do some research and find out. We developed a list of traits or actions that nice drivers would be likely to display and then surveyed a number of drivers from different regions and cities in the UK to see how often they did these.

From this data, we developed a list of which cities could boast the nicest drivers and which needed to take lessons in driving etiquette. Here’s how we did it.

What Makes a Nice Driver?

In our quest to find the place with the nicest drivers, we asked a thousand drivers from across the UK if they regularly demonstrated the traits of a nice driver using the list we’d developed. In order of popularity, these were:

1.      Letting people cut in front of you during rush hour traffic

2.      Saying thank you to kind drivers with a nod or a wave of appreciation

3.      Giving right of way to other drivers

4.      Letting pedestrians cross the road

5.      Being patient with learner drivers

6.      Flashing your lights to let others know their lights are off

7.      Making others aware of any speed cameras ahead

8.      Car sharing

9.      None of the above

Of the eight options, we combined all the data so that we could rank the UK regions by which were the nicest and the least nice. We then looked at how much these varied according to the major cities and what type of person would be likely to make the nicest drivers. Let’s take a look at the results.

Where are the Nicest Drivers in the UK?

According to our data, the regions that are taking the high road with their nice drivers are the West Midlands, Wales and Scotland, which hold the top three spots in our list. Down at the bottom of our table is the South East and South West, with these regions admitting to engaging in our list of nice driving habits the least.

When we broke down this data further to see what the major cities of the UK were like for nice drivers, the five cities that topped our list were:

·         Wrexham

·         Coventry

·         Chelmsford

·         Worcester

·         Swansea

At the bottom of the list with the least nice drivers was Brighton and Hove, closely followed by Gloucester, Sheffield, Cambridge and Leicester.

Northern cities Manchester and Leeds were the nicest for letting people out in traffic and letting pedestrians cross the road and Glasgow was the city who were the most patient with learner drives. Looks as though the North is holding on to its friendly reputation, even on the roads!

Who is Likely to Be a Nicer Driver?

We decided to drive further into the data and see if we could find out more about what type of person is more likely to be a nicer driver on the road. The results were very interesting, with more females:

·         Letting people out in traffic

·         Giving right of way to other drivers

·         Being patient with learner drivers

·         Letting pedestrians cross the road

·         Car sharing

·         Showing appreciation to kind drivers

On the other hand, males were more likely to:

·         Make others aware if there’s a speed camera ahead

·         Flash their lights at others to let them know their lights are off

·         None of the above 

 

This shows that females generally tend to be the nicer drivers according to our data and in terms of age, those who are 55 and over are more likely to be nice drivers.

  

How does your city rank on the list of places with the nicest drivers? If your region or city appears towards the bottom of the list, then you know what to do. Be kinder when letting people out in traffic or when you’re driving behind learner drivers and don’t forget to give a friendly thank you wave to show your appreciation to fellow nice drivers.

If you’re in the West Midlands, keep doing what you’re doing. Especially the female drivers who are over 55 years old – you’ve passed our nice driver test with flying colours!