Here’s Just How Bad Drivers Are In Arizona

PHOENIX, AZ — Arizona just ranked 9th worst in the country when it comes to bad drivers. The financial advising company SmartAsset released its second annual study on states with the best and worst drivers this month. The study looked at four metrics: percent of drivers with insurance, number of DUIs per driver, average number of deaths per miles driven and how often residents Google terms such as traffic ticket or speeding ticket.

Arizona tied with Alaska for bad drivers and was slightly worse than Kentucky. Across state lines, New Mexico fared even worse, ranking 5th overall. Here’s the complete breakdown for Arizona:

• Percent of drivers with insurance: 88 percent
• Number of DUIs per driver: 4.4
• Average number of deaths per miles driven: 1.46
• Index: 87.41

Arizona scored in the top half for all four of the metrics, with its worst score coming in the death rate.

"According to the 2016 data from NHTSA, Arizona had 962 fatalities," the authors wrote. "That’s 1.46 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. Fortunately, that figure is trending down. Since 1994, the fatality rate per miles driven has fallen 37%."

Bad drivers are a drag. Literally. They cause headache-inducing traffic congestion — which cost the U.S. an estimated $305 billion last year — and can lead to costly crashes and even death.

So if you’re planning a road trip anytime soon, you might want to avoid Mississippi, Tennessee and basically the rest of the South. Mississippi ranked the worst in the country, with the authors noting it had the second-highest death rate in the country at 1.7 deaths per 100 million miles driven.

“Insurance rates in Mississippi are also fairly low, which raises the chance that an accident will lead to someone paying for repairs out of pocket,” the authors wrote. “Those high, unexpected costs can really take a toll on the checking accounts of Mississippi drivers.”

Furthermore, Google Trends data indicated quite a few Mississippi drivers “run afoul of the law,” with the state having the 11th highest search volume for ticket offenses.

Overall, five of the 10 worst states were located in the South. These states tended to have the highest death rates and lowest auto insurance rates, the authors wrote. Florida fell to 8th this year after ranking worst last year and still has the lowest rate of insured drivers at a paltry 73 percent.

Here are the states with the worst drivers:

1. Mississippi

2. Tennessee

3. California

3. Missouri

5. New Mexico

5. Texas

7. Alabama

8. Florida

9. Alaska

9. Arizona

If safety is what you’re after on your next road trip, consider the Northeast. Massachusetts has the best drivers, while Vermont, Connecticut and New York all ranked in the top five. Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island fell inside the top 10.

The prevalence of Google searches for “traffic ticket” and “speeding ticket” was included in the final analysis but the results were not published, the authors noted.

After ranking each state in the four metrics, SmartAsset calculated each state’s average ranking, giving each metric an equal weight. It then used the average rankings to determine a state's final score.

Photo credit: Shutterstock