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Italy is a world-renowned holiday destination, with wonderful art, iconic scenery and top-class food.
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However, one metric that appears to leave much to be desired is its roads, and particularly its drivers.
Italy is the country with the most aggressive drivers, according to the respondents of a recent global survey, with 23% of drivers claiming they experienced erratic or reckless behaviour in the country.
Second place may not be the most obvious, though: the UK is usually pictured with rolling green hills and some of the world’s most comfortable cars, yet it ranked second in the poll by car rental platform Discovercars.com, with 11% of drivers saying they endured aggressive attitudes there. London in particular emerged as one of the most mentioned cities.
What are the most annoying driver behaviours?
The US comes in third place with 9%, followed by France and Australia with 5% each.
In joint fifth place, 4% of survey respondents said they had experienced the most aggression on the roads in Spain, with another 4% for Turkey.
The most annoying behaviour tends to be failing to indicate at turns (56%).
Tailgating also annoys drivers (46%), even more than slow driving in the overtaking lane (43%) and sudden braking (20%).
Which countries were voted as the most polite?
Perceptions of a country’s politeness differ depending on whether its citizens are on or off the road, although there are still some common trends.
Italians also scored poorly in another poll on manners, ranking among the countries least associated with politeness in general: 24th out of 25 countries according toa poll by financial services company Remitly. Only Austria fared worse.
Firmly at the top of the chart is Japan, where bowing is still considered a sign of respect. It was followed by Canada and then the UK in third place.
The same poll asked respondents to reflect on their own behaviour and determine whether they would consider themselves polite and whether they treat strangers with respect.
Interestingly, Japanese people gave themselves one of the lowest rankings, albeit still high (8.73/10).
Brazil and Chile are the nations that most see themselves as the most polite in the world overall among the surveyed nations, giving themselves an average score of 9.46. The Indians came next (9.41), followed by the Swedes (9.40) and the French (9.40).