The rest of the Discourtesy Top 5: Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

The casual statistician in me doesn't put a lot of stock in these rankings. I would guess that the sample size — 2,500 drivers across the entire United States — might allow one to come to general conclusions about national trends but would be unlikely to provide much really meaningful information about each of the 25 cities the report says were surveyed.

And although, yes, I have a little swelling of pride when I read that my native Chicago is ninth least courteous, with drivers there being the most likely to curse or shake their fists at other drivers, the findings for San Francisco — drivers least likely to have talked on the phone while at the wheel — just don't seem to jibe with what I see every day on the streets. Which is, in short, all sorts of the kind of jerky behavior that I assume goes along with driving a car anywhere. I plead occasionally guilty to the above-named offense.

It's true that these are relative findings: Fewer San Francisco drivers say they talk on the phone while driving compared to Houston, for instance (a finding that may reveal Houston as a capital of honesty and self-knowledge). I'm not driving in all those other cities, so maybe San Francisco really is more courteous.

But courtesy in this case doesn't equate with safety. And we've got the numbers to back that up, with at least seven pedestrians killed by vehicles so far this year.

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