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We’ve previously posted about the theory that Colorado drivers are terrible – an extremely important consideration on a day like today, when roads are icy and often treacherous owing to the impact of yesterday’s steady snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures that continue to linger at this writing.
Now come facts and figures to support this supposition.
The insurance-based website QuoteWizard recently published its list of the best and worst drivers by state. We’ve got the complete roster below, ranked from the finest to the lousiest.
As you’ll see, Colorado is in the bottom ten.
Why? To answer that question, we reached out to QuoteWizard content manager Adam Johnson.
According to Johnson, corresponding via e-mail, “We sampled incident data (with more than 2 million data points) from the users of our website and linearly extrapolated it to Federal Highway Administration fatality data. To quantify overall driver standards for comparison, we weighted various incident counts for each state with its occurrence percentage. The final rankings are a sum of weighted means calculated from total accidents, speeding tickets, DUI, citations and fatalities.”
Johnson notes that the information was collected at the state level, “so it doesn’t detail drivers in different parts of Colorado.” In addition, he goes on, “We didn’t break out that data by location, time of year, weather conditions, etc. Our goal is to present our findings and let Colorado drivers come to their own conclusion.”
As for why Colorado fared so badly, Johnson reveals the state’s standings in five major categories. Here they are, displayed in descending order.
Fatalities: 30th most in the U.S.
Accidents: 20th most in the U.S.
DUIs: 11th most in the U.S.
Speeding: 10th most violations in the U.S.
Citations: Number 1 – worst in the U.S.
By the way, Johnson defines citations as “minor violations such as failure to signal, illegal turns, not wearing a seat belt.”
The findings show that Colorado drivers are particularly prone to driving too fast and ignoring the rules of the road – and given the proclivities of folks here to drive drunk and get into accidents, it’s a minor miracle that the death figures aren’t higher.
Continue to see the photo-illustrated QuoteWizard list of driving by state, starting with the best drivers and ending with the worst.
QuoteWizard’s state driving list, from best to worst.
1. Rhode Island
2. Florida
3. Mississippi
4. Michigan
5. Nevada
6. Arkansas
7. South Dakota
8. Illinois
9. West Virginia
10. Oklahoma
11. Kentucky
12. Montana
13. New York
14. Hawaii
15. Alaska
16. Tennessee
17. Pennsylvania
18. Indiana
19. Massachusetts
20. Texas
21. Alabama
22. Iowa
23. Louisiana
24. North Carolina
25. New Hampshire
26. Wisconsin
27. New Mexico
28. Wyoming
29. Maryland
30. Connecticut
31. Oregon
32. New Jersey
33. Delaware
34. Ohio
35 Vermont
36. Georgia
37. Idaho
38. Kansas
39. Missouri
40. Minnesota
41. Arizona
42. Washington
43. Colorado
44. North Dakota
45. South Carolina
46. Nebraska
47. Maine
48 Virginia
49. California
50. Utah
Click to see the original QuoteWizard post.
