2022's Worst Driving City Is Philadelphia, WalletHub Says

PHILADELPHIA — It's no shocker that driving in and around Philadelphia can be a maddening experience.

And now a study from WalletHub confirms what many drivers in the region think.

WalletHub Tuesday published "2022’s Best & Worst Cities to Drive in."

Coming in at the worst, ranked 100 out of 100, is Philadelphia.

Below are some superlatives for driving in Philadelphia:

• 60th in annual hours spent in congestion per auto commuter (tied with Miami, Florida; Boston, Massachusetts; New York, New York; and Chicago, Illinois)
• 95th in accident likelihood in city versus the national average
• 37th in rate of car thefts
• 89th in auto-repair shops per capita
• 64th in Average gas prices
• 86th in auto-maintenance costs
• 78th in average parking rates

To come up with the ranks, WalletHub compared a sample of the 100 most populated U.S. cities across four key dimensions: cost of ownership and maintenance, traffic and infrastructure, safety, and access to vehicles and maintenance. The sample considers only the city proper in each case and excludes cities in the surrounding metro area.

WalletHub evaluated those dimensions using 30 relevant metrics.

Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for drivers.

Finally, WalletHub determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the sample.

The five worst cities to drive in are:

No. 100 — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
No. 99 — Detroit, Michigan
No. 98 — Oakland, California
No. 97 — San Francisco, California
No. 96 — Chicago, Illinois

The five best cities for driving are:

No. 1 — Raleigh, North Carolina
No. 2 — Plano, Texas
No. 3 — Corpus Christi, Texas
No. 4 — Greensboro, North Carolina
No. 5 — Winston-Salem, North Carolina

See the full ranks and methodology online here.