I have several qualms with Southern drivers. One of the biggest is that they are passive as hell. They meander, love driving under the speed limit, and take forever to say like, merge lanes, and will literally stop on the highway in order to do so. Am I generalizing? Probably, but also, maybe not?
My biggest gripe with North Carolina drivers, however, is their tendency to fail to use a turn signal. It happens constantly. You’ll come to a stoplight, or a stop sign, or the end of a parking lot, and these people will sit forever waiting to turn out into traffic, but it’s like a crapshoot as to which way they will turn, because the turn signal is seemingly invisible to them.
For a while, I thought that ranting and raving about North Carolinian drivers lack of turn-signal etiquette was my personal Sisyphean rant, but over time, I’ve had other friends—mostly other northeastern transplants—admit that, yes, they agree that blinkers are forsaken here in NC, so I’ve decided to conduct an unofficial study, using what else, but the almighty Google algorithm, to prove my hypothesis correct.
One of my first hits seemed promising, a Reddit thread posted to the North Carolina subreddit simply titled “I just moved here two weeks ago. What do y’all have against turning signals?”
“I can count on multiple hands how many people I’ve seen use a turning signal in front of me. I almost rear-ended a cop this morning because he basically brake-checked me to turn right, you guessed it, without his signal lol,” the poster wrote.
“God I feel this in my soul, this state has given me road rage about turn signals not being used,” the top comment reads.
In 2017, 88.5 WFDD, the public radio station for the Piedmont and “high country,” posted an article with the title “Carolina Curious: Why Don’t People Use Their Turn Signals?” The radio host posting the article wrote that he has noticed people here don’t use turn signals, so he conducted, like me, an unscientific study. The result? He “noticed” that two out of three NC drivers don’t use turn signals.
Both of these are anecdotal, though. I’d love some hard data. I’d love to make this somewhat scientific.
On a more holistic level, A report issued by the Society of Automotive Engineers back in 2012 showed that 48% of all drivers failed to signal a lane change and 25% neglected to use their signals when turning.
However, that’s a little outdated (though it is the last time a turn-signal study was done), and doesn’t zoom in enough on the south to really validate my hypothesis.
However, in 2024 (current! Just last year!), a student found that North Carolina was ranked number 6 as the worst-driving state in America (in 2023, it was number 5)!
That’s the scientific evidence I was looking for. I love being right.
AshevilleExplorer 