Most New Yorkers think the city is full of bad drivers. New data obtained by Gothamist reinforces that perception: Nearly half the Big Apple’s would-be motorists have failed their driving tests so far this year.
That failure rate — 48% — is higher than the statewide average of 43%, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The odds of flunking the test within the city has risen steadily since the COVID-19 pandemic: In 2021, the failure rate in the city was 41%, the data shows.
The growth in the flunk rate came the same time that reckless driving and traffic deaths also increased across the city. Statewide traffic deaths climbed 25% across New York state between 2019 and 2022. In the first six months of 2024, 127 people were killed by drivers compared to 82 people fatally shot in the same period.
Traffic analyst Charles Komanoff says the increased failure rate reflects a growing sense of chaos on city streets.
“That [data] jibes perfectly with what I and I think every other sentient New Yorker sees every day, which is the ongoing collapse of driver performance, driver awareness, driver consideration and driver law abiding-ness that you see practically on every street in the city.”
Komanoff called some drivers’ inability to adhere to basic traffic laws “comical.”
“I have been seeing more of that dysfunction in the past year or two, than I ever have in my 50 years of riding a bike every day in New York City,” he said.
The unsatisfactory DMV tests are especially bad at testing sites in Brooklyn and Queens, where the failure rate this year has hit 56% and 57%, respectively. In the Bronx, 42% of road test takers failed. The DMV does not offer a road test in Manhattan.
The only borough where the success rate for road tests has improved this year is Staten Island, which retired driving instructor Jose Corpas said is due to the area’s relatively low density.
“Staten Island does have usually a higher passing rate,” he said. “I attribute that to less traffic in some of the road test areas in Staten Island.”
DMV representatives had no explanation as to why the failure rate has grown.
“The standards and procedures for conducting road tests have not changed,” DMV spokesperson Walter McLure wrote in a statement. “For the safety of everyone on our roads, it is paramount to DMV and our road test examiners that only qualified drivers pass the road test.”
The DMV road test can be tricky even for experienced drivers. Test takers are evaluated by agency workers who add up points based on mistakes. If a driver reaches 30 or more points, they fail. Small errors like failing to signal come with a 5-point demerit, while bigger issues like messing up a three-point turn or a parallel park ding drivers 15 points.
Egregious mistakes — like driving on the wrong side of the street — result in an automatic failure.
Johnathan Romano, a co-owner of SoHo Driving School in Manhattan, said one of his students failed a road test earlier this year after racking up 65 points, as well as an automatic failure for “insufficient skill or practice,” a general term DMV examiners use when a test taker seems to lack a basic understanding of how to drive.
Romano said the driver took their road test in the Bronx. He theorized that DMV employees in the borough are overworked and are taking out their frustration on test takers.
“They might get easily irked,” he said. “And even if the person did it right, they’re just irked by the person and they fail them because it doesn’t matter to them.”
McClure took issue with driving instructors blaming DMV examiners for the rising failure rate.
“If customers of certain driving schools are not prepared, we challenge the driving school instructors to do better,” he said.