OAKLAND — The hassles and expenses of driving can quickly add up, especially as Americans are increasingly paying more at gas pumps, spending long hours in traffic congestion and weathering damage from roads riddled with potholes.
In even more bad news for Bay Area drivers, Oakland and San Francisco are the top two worst places to get behind the wheel, according to an annual report by WalletHub, which compared 30 “indicators of driver-friendliness” across the 100 largest cities in the United States.
The report was broken down into four main dimensions: cost of ownership and maintenance; traffic and infrastructure; safety; and access to vehicles and maintenance.
Each of the cities was graded on a 100-point scale, weighed on a ranked list of concerns, including the cost of a new car, quality of local roads, accident likelihood, insurance premiums and rate of vehicle thefts in any given city. Issues such as access to repair shops and a city’s share of uninsured drivers were ranked lower.
Smaller suburban cities notably fared better than denser, car-clogged metropolitan areas.
San Francisco and Oakland ranked 99th and 100th, respectively, in the Top 100 list. The Bay Area’s second and third largest cities only earned a total score of 38.14 and 38.15, respectively — closely followed by Detroit, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles.
In 2017, Americans relied on personal vehicles for 87% of daily trips, according to the Bureau of Transportation statistics. And while the pandemic has dramatically shifted travel habits, and alternatives such as public transit, cycling and ride shares and walking still abound in the Golden State, the plethora of problems drivers face remains daunting.
All except two of the 17 California cities included in the survey ranked in the bottom third of the list, with Irvine and Riverside coming in at 45th and 65th place.
Conversely, WalletHub awarded the top three spots on its list to Corpus Christi, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Boise, Idaho.
However, while motorists in those locales enjoy some of the lowest average gas prices, accident rates, parking expenses and hours spent in traffic during daily commutes, none of those cities earned better than a D+ grade — with 66.5 percent for Corpus Christi the top ranking — potentially illustrating the dire state of driving across the country.