Those of us who drive in Philadelphia on the regular often find ourselves wondering "what is that other driver thinking?" as we catch drivers running red lights on Belmont Avenue, weaving in an out of traffic (without turn signals) on the Schuylkill Expressway, putting the pedal to the metal on Woodhaven Road and seeing parking tickets pile up on cars in Center City.
Now it seems the horribleness of driving in the 215/267/445 is getting national scrutiny.
WalletHub just named Philly the "Worst City to Drive in" in its 2022’s Best & Worst Cities to Drive in list. The City of Bortherly Love came in 100 out the 100 cities WalletHub looked at for 30 separate metrics under the categories of Cost of Ownership & Maintenance, Traffic & Infrastructure, Safety and Access to Vehicles & Maintenance.
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Each city had a chance to get up to 100 points as a group of PhD's and professors crunched the data. (Click here for a look at the full methodology.)
It seems that the likelihood of crashing, cost of repairs, cost of parking and time spent in traffic helped drive Philadelphia's rock bottom ranking.
Philly came in near the bottom of the rankings in the Accident Likelihood in City vs. National Avg. (95th), Auto-Repair Shops per Capita (89th) and Auto-Maintenance Costs (86th) metrics. The City of Brotherly Love also was in the bottom half of cities for Avg. Parking Rates (78th), Avg. Gas Prices (64th) and Annual Hours Spent in Congestion per Auto Commuter (60th).
At least that expensive and dinged up automobile isn't as likely to be stolen as Philly landed in the top half of WalletHub's rankings for the Rate of Car Thefts (37th).
It wasn't even close as Philadelphia crashed to the bottom as the city's 36.32 score fell more than two full points below 99th-placed Detroit.
North Carolina and Texas must be nice places to drive around as cities in those states occupied the Top 5 spots. Raleigh, North Carolina, rode a low cost of ownership and high safety rating to the top spot. Plano, Texas; Corpus Christi, Texas; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina rounded out the Top 5.
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