Best and Worst Drivers in America

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QuoteWizard found that the nation’s best drivers are in Orlando, Miami, El Paso, Detroit, and Little Rock, while the worst driving cities are Omaha, Riverside, Sacramento, Columbus, and the Bay Area.

Contributing to the worst cities are accidents, speeding, driving violations, DUI and proliferation of ridesharing services.

The worst ranking are:

  1. Omaha, NE – propelling their rise to the top are sizeable increases in accidents, speeding, and driving violations.
  2. Riverside, CA – earned it spot on the list thanks to a higher DUI rate than any other city. Riverside is in the middle of the pack when it comes to accidents, and slightly worse than average for speeding and accidents.
  3. Sacramento, CA – Last year’s worst-driving city is now only a distant third! A drop in speeding and accidents improved Sacramento’s overall driving score, even though they stayed relatively static in terms of DUIs and violations.
  4. Columbus, OH – Though Columbus cut down on accidents and speeding, they increased their DUI and violation rates. That was enough to boost them from seventh-worst to fourth-worst.
  5. San Francisco Bay Area, CA As one of this year’s biggest movers, the Bay Area jumped from 13th worst last year to fifth worst. They performed worse in every category, particularly accidents and speeding. It’s possible that the increase in citations is due to the glut of rideshare drivers clogging the streets, with SFPD reporting that nearly two-thirds of all downtown traffic citations went to Lyft and Uber drivers.

Best ranked city drivers:

  1. Orlando is 2018’s best driving city. Their great ranking is buoyed by rock-bottom DUI and speeding rates
  2. Miami jumped from fourth in 2017 to second this year thanks to impressively low DUI and speeding rates.
  3. El Paso is one of the biggest movers, leaping from 12th best in 2017 to third best this year. Their improvement comes on the back of vastly lower DUI and accident rates. T
  4. Detroit handily out-drives their Michigan neighbors over in Grand Rapids, who came in at 19th best. This is a sliver of good news for Detroit residents, as Michigan drivers pay the highest car insurance rates in the country.
  5. Little Rock is the fifth best drivers in America for the second year in a row! Violation rates increased substantially, but it was offset by an improvement in their speeding rate. They’re the only Arkansas city to appear on the list,

“Most people think America’s worst drivers are the ones who live in their city,” says Adam Johnson, QuoteWizard content manager. “But that’s not always the case. We analyzed millions of data points on drivers throughout the US and what we found provides an interesting and sometimes surprising snapshot of the best and worst drivers in America.”

Methodology

QuoteWizard sampled incident data (with more than one million data points) from drivers who used its services. To quantify overall driver quality for comparison, we weighted incident counts for each city with its frequency. The final rankings are a sum of weighted means calculated from total accidents, speeding tickets, DUIs, and citations.