Projo Offbeat Blog

If you're a bicyclist, you don't want to share the road with a hybrid car.

And you definitely don't want to share the road with the driver of a hybrid car who has the bad driver gene, which is said to exist in 30 percent of the driving population, except in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where it's prevalent in 90 percent of drivers.

A disturbing new study by the National Transportation Safety Board takes the shine off all those do-gooders in their Insights and Priuses. The study concluded that hybrid cars strike bicyclists or pedestrians more often than conventional cars do.

Now some people chalk it up to the hybrids being quieter and suggest they need to be equipped with noise makers. (I think the sound of birds chirping or waves crashing would be appropriate.) But at least one writer hints that the high accident rate is the product of jealous tree huggers trying to bump off two groups that rank higher in the eco-friendly pecking order.

I'd like to think it's more innocent than that. I'd like to think that those dangerous drivers were just day-dreaming about saving piping plovers or hugging Al Gore.

And maybe they all have the bad driver gene. Another study recently showed that people with a certain gene variant performed 20 percent worse on a driving test.

The research suggests that some people are born bad drivers. (We all know kids who were always crashing their scooters into the kitchen table.) According to researchers, 30 percent of us have this gene variant. (Although none of us would admit to it, since we're all great drivers, right? It's all those other guys with the bad driving genes.)

The research means that there's a 30 percent chance that the guy who cut you off on the way to work this morning just couldn't help himself.

I bet you still don't feel bad about cursing him.

 Tags  Al Gore driving hybrid cars tree huggers

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