My methodology doesn't seem to cause me any issues anywhere else in the country. Lived in southeast, midwest, Texas (which is a region all its own), northwest, and then New England. If my methodology is flawed for the New England area, this is itself suggestive that they have radically different rules. I didn't notice it in Boston or Rhode Island; it did seem to come up in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and to some extent New York. New Haven was probably the worst city about it, although it depended pretty heavily on where you were; it wasn't quite as bad around Yale University.