Authored By Chloé Morrison

CNBC recently listed Chattanooga as No. 7 in a ranking of the 15 dangerous cities to drive in, using the amount of fatalities to back up the report.

Former Chattanooga resident Robbie Nicholson, who now lives in Birmingham, said he thinks that people forget how bad driving and traffic are in the city where they live.

“(I’m) white-knuckled when I drive there,” he said of Chattanooga. “The Ridgecut makes me so nervous now.

“You become immune to it. It affects your driving pattern. You drive like them,” he said.

Los Angeles resident Taylor Peck, creator of Driver-Ratings.com, said that when he and his friend started the website, he assumed that big cities, such as Los Angeles and New York City, would generate the majority of reviews.

But instead smaller cities create the much of the content, he said.

Chattanooga is consistently in the top five cities reviewed on the site, Peck said.

“My theory behind that is if you live in a big city, you expect bad traffic,” he said.

Driver-Ratings.com

Peck said the website is for anyone who has ever been cut off in traffic and filled with road rage.

“A few months ago, a friend and I witnesses a driver almost cause a three-car pileup at a busy intersection,” he said. “No police were present and he simply sped away without facing any consequences. Three weeks later we launched Driver-Ratings.com. It is a simple website which allows drivers to rate other drivers by their license plate numbers.”

The negative experience prompted the new site, where users can view a list of drivers with poor ratings by state or search a specific license plate number.

The website, which has been in the beta stage of development for two months, just reached its 80,000th driver rating, and Peck said he has been surprised by the number of uplifting stories users share.

“The positive reviews are quite heartwarming,” he said. “There was one about an off-duty police officer who pulled over and helped a woman change a tire.”

About 40 percent of the reviews are positive, Peck said.

“If you let someone in, it can change someone’s day,” he said.

The purpose of Peck’s website is to provide a forum for accountability for drivers and to protect pedestrians and bikers, he said.

“If you are purposely going out and being an aggressive driver, there is now a forum where you can be held accountable,” he said. “It’s not going to get you in trouble with the law, but you’ll have a bad reputation online. We want to defuse violence and also hold people accountable.”

Driving in Chattanooga

Local news and traffic radio reporter Sean Paul said that he is surprised that Chattanoogans have bad driving reputations.

“I don’t think we have near the problems that we used to,” he said. “I think that problems are out there – make no mistake – but I’d like to see what data they used to determine that we were number seven,” he said of the CNBC.com report.

Paul, who works for Citadel Broadcasting in Chattanooga, said that the interstate-widening has helped significantly.

He also said crews are faster at clearing accidents and that drivers are better at staying away from areas where there are problems.