There's another downside to living in the Bay Area.
According to a study by WalletHub, San Francisco is now America's worst city for drivers and Oakland is the second worst. What does that mean exactly? Let's examine:
WalletHub's 12 experts (including the University of California, Berkeley's Susan Shaheen) looked at the 100 largest cities in the United States and examined them through the lens of 25 different car-related factors in four main categories: Cost of Ownership & Maintenance, Traffic & Infrastructure, Safety, and Access to Vehicles & Maintenance. Each of the 25 factors were assigned point values and WalletHub added up each city's score, with 100 being the highest, or a perfect score.
San Francisco scored a 29.46.
Oakland scored a 36.37.
No one is worse than us. The next worst city in California is Los Angeles, coming in at 91st place with a score of 42.16. San Jose came in 87th with a score of 45.18.
All of the top scoring cities were out in the middle of nowhere Texas. For example, Corpus Christie came in first with a score of 69.76. San Francisco also tied with several other cities for worst traffic congestion, and Oakland tied with four other cities for highest car theft rate and highest average gas prices. The Bay Area scored OK only in weather-related factors.
This latest study echoes a report released last fall that suggests Bay Area traffic has increased as much as 70 percent in the last six years and a lot of people are going to tell you that rideshare companies share some blame for that. A new report released in June suggests that Uber and Lyft alone account for 15 to 20 percent of weekday traffic in San Francisco.
But hey, at least we still have a world-class public transit system.
Related: Driving Apps Like Waze Are Making Traffic Worse, Says Expert