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We recently surveyed 3,015 truckers to uncover the most common unsafe driving behaviors, including cutting off trucks, crowding blind spots, and not keeping a safe distance.
Here are the full rankings.
Key Findings
Florida drivers appear to be the worst.
It doesn’t just have Miami and Orlando in the mix – the state is dotted all over the rankings.
Lakeland, Palm Bay, Fort Lauderdale, and even Cape Coral show up. Tourists, constant roadwork, and the heat of the freeways probably all combine into a stressful cocktail for truckers.
California drivers are almost as bad.
LA and Oakland make sense, but there’s also Vallejo, Simi Valley, Modesto, and Anaheim.
That suggests it’s not one city causing the headaches – it’s more of a statewide culture of squeezing trucks into gaps where they don’t fit.
New York City came top, but other NY cities are no angels.
Buffalo, Syracuse, Yonkers, and Rochester are all in there, too.
Add in brutal winters, narrow streets, and endless traffic, and you can see why truckers rank it as one of the most stressful states to drive through.
Smaller Texas cities are well represented.
Houston and Dallas are obvious, but smaller places like College Station, Waco, Killeen, and Pearland also cut.
It is telling that the problem shows up on both wide-open highways and in mid-sized towns.
One surprise: college towns.
Gainesville, Tallahassee, College Station, Athens – all appear. Maybe the mix of young drivers and heavy traffic makes life harder for semis than you would expect.
Smaller cities are just as guilty of bad driving.
Vallejo in California, Amarillo in Texas, and even Lakeland in Florida. These aren’t huge metros, but truckers still flagged them as places where drivers push too close for comfort.
Final Thoughts
The list doesn’t just call out “bad drivers” in the usual suspects like New York or LA. It shows entire regions where truckers consistently struggle to get the space they need.
Florida’s chaos, California’s impatience, New Jersey’s congestion – the themes repeat.
The takeaway is pretty simple: bad habits aren’t limited to any one city, and giving trucks a proper buffer is a problem just about everywhere.
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