With 40 million residents and some of the most congested freeways in the country, California has earned its reputation for lousy driving. A new WalletHub report reinforces that image, ranking several California cities among the worst places to drive in the U.S.
WalletHub described its methodology this way:
In order to determine the best and worst cities for drivers, WalletHub compared a sample of the 100 most populated U.S. cities across four key dimensions: 1) Cost of Ownership & Maintenance, 2) Traffic & Infrastructure, 3) Safety and 4) Access to Vehicles & Maintenance. Our sample considers only the city proper in each case and excludes cities in the surrounding metro area.
We evaluated those dimensions using 30 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for drivers. Data for metrics marked with an asterisk (*) were available at the state level only. For metrics marked with two asterisks (**), the square root of the population was used to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for minor differences across cities.
Finally, we determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.
No California cities made the top 10 cities for drivers, but several of them made the bottom 10.
These are California’s five worst cities for driving, according to WalletHub:
1. Oakland (#99 nationally)
2. San Francisco (#95 nationally)
3. Los Angeles (#93 nationally)
4. San Jose (#92 nationally)
5. San Diego (#85)
List and data were compiled by WalletHub and do not reflect statistics on all cities.