Alabama is home to some of America’s worst drivers, study says

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Cut off on your way to the office this morning? Saw someone get pulled for speeding over the weekend? As you shake your head and fists at other Alabama drivers in disapproval, know you’re not alone. A new study has revealed Alabama is home to some of America’s worst drivers.

Recently, New York City financial technology company SmartAsset identified the states with the worst drivers, and Alabama took the sixth spot.

Turns out, relatively few people are insured in Alabama. The state ranks seventh-worst in that category with just 80.40 percent insured. And, Alabama had the 12th-highest number of deaths per thousand drivers.

There was one bright spot for Alabama, however — the state has the fourth-best score with only 1.42 DUI arrests per thousand drivers. That statistic does not tell the whole story, though, as 33 percent of deaths in Alabama resulted from a driver being over the legal alcohol limit.

Here’s how Alabama ranks by the numbers:

  • Percentage of driver’s insured: 80.4 percent
  • DUI arrests per 1,000 drivers: 1.43
  • Vehicular related deaths per 1,000 drivers: 0.2
  • Google Trend “driving tickets:” 67.88
  • Index: 55.57

Check out the country’s top 10 states with the worst drivers below:

SmartAsset 2016 Worst Drivers Map

In order to find out which state had the worst drivers, SmartAsset collected data across four metrics, then indexed each factor for every state giving equal weighting, and then finding the average score per state to create the final index.

  • Percentage insured: data is taken from the Insurance Research Council.
  • DUI per thousand drivers: number of drivers is taken from the Federal Highway Administration. Number of DUIs is taken from the State Justice Department.
  • Deaths per thousand drivers: data is taken from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which is part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
  • Google trends on driving tickets: the average of the scores each state received in Google Trends for the eight phrases: speeding ticket, “speeding ticket,” speeding tickets, “speeding tickets,” traffic ticket, “traffic ticket,” traffic tickets and “traffic tickets.”

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