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Boston drivers used to be just as bad or even worse than New Yorkers. They also had a lot of police scandals.

Not that things are perfect now, but they’re better. Drivers didn’t all undergo psychotherapy or some kumbaya realization that we can all just get along.

What happened is that the BPD stepped up enforcement. Mayor Menino made safety for cyclists and pedestrians a top priority. Streets got redesigned.

If we had better leadership at the top of the NYPD, a City Council that was focused more on safety and less on parking, and less NIMBY resistance to bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, then the city would be safer.

If we want to wait until drivers all get over their rage, well, good luck with that.

After injured cyclist Michelle Matson completed her testimony — NYPD stopped investigating the hit-and-run crash that put Matson and her boyfriend in the hospital, telling them the owner of the car had an alibi — a nonplussed Peter Vallone said NYPD should not act as defense counsel for drivers.

Which is more shocking: the correct use of “nonplussed” or the NYPD helping a bad driver escape culpability for seriously injuring someone?

1,251 pedestrians were injured or killed in December 2011, and NYPD reports show that 89 percent of crashes that month were caused by careless or illegal driving. Yet in all of 2011, citations under VTL 1146 were made in less than one percent of crashes caused by careless or illegal driving in which a pedestrian was injured or killed.

The inefficient parking story at the bottom is very telling. As much as the Post, etc. may try to displace their aggression onto people who ride bicycles, the real hell for drivers is other drivers (and parkers). We had a group, which since moved away, doing this on our block — and someone got mad enough to circulate a flyer against them.

This goes to show why drivers are easy to incite and cannot be made happy, because there is no way to solve the problem of too many cars in too little space.

At first, NYPD would not release the report, and when it was released, no such information was included. Ultimately the family learned that NYPD did not report the crash to Soldaner’s insurer.

If you run over and kill someone, the NYPD will do what it can to make sure your auto insurance doesn’t go up.

Political reality is a handy thing. Everyone seems to have a healthy grasp of it, at least judging by the number of people who have lectured me recently on the political reality of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, the fate of the Rockaway Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, and the parking garages proposed for the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad.

Peter Vallone, chair of the council public safety committee and co-chair of today’s hearing — and a former Manhattan prosecutor — asked if police currently charge drivers who speed or are involved in crashes with reckless endangerment, which he said could be done with no changes to existing law. Susan Petito, a senior attorney for NYPD, responded that such data is not segregated, and the department therefore couldn’t say. More generally, Petito said that while reckless endangerment is “available as a tool,” police can’t normally determine probable cause if they don’t witness a violation.

Probable cause? This whole discussion is bizarre. Police can not even bother to manufacture plausible excuses for their inaction, because they have never had to think this stuff through before. The sound like children trying to explain their parents’ taxes.

And again with the “tool” jargon. I’ve remembered where we’ve heard it so much before, and why it gives me such a chill: the horrid Patriot Act. That was all about giving law enforcement “tools” to spy on everyone so they might capture those terrible terrorists in our midst.

But the actual connection between new government spying powers and the need to hold negligent drivers accountable is nonexistent. The police and DA could prosecute vehicular crimes just fine without new powers, they just have to do their jobs.

From 2001 through 2011, seven pedestrians were killed in bike-ped accidents. For some perspective on just how miniscule that statistic is, Gothamist is reporting that in a twelve-hour period beginning on Saturday night, five people were killed in car accidents. Two of them were pedestrians hit by drivers who fled the scene.