Survey Ranks Wyoming 41st Best State For Drivers

A survey by the financial website Wallethub rated Wyoming as the 41st worst state to drive in.

You can see the survey findings here.

The survey ranked states in four categories:  cost of ownership and maintenance, traffic and infrastructure, safety, and access to vehicles and maintenance.

The website explains the tabulation of the scores this way:

“We evaluated those dimensions using 31 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the best for drivers.

Finally, we determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the following scores to rank-order the states.

For metrics marked with an asterisk (*), the square root of the population was used to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for minor differences across states.”

Wyoming did poorly in the categories of safety and access to vehicles&maintenance, scoring a ’48’ out of 50 in each area.

But the state did well in the cost of ownership and maintenance, scoring 15. The survey found Wyoming actually had the third-lowest maintenance cost in the country.

And the state’s BEST category was traffic and infrastructure, where it scored an 8th in the country. It’s probably a safe bet that the state’s low population–and corresponding low traffic rates–were a strong factor.

While Wyoming did not do especially well overall in the survey, we did finish slightly ahead of our neighbor’s to the south. Colorado finished 43rd in the survey, with a total score of 50.85, compared to Wyoming’s tally of 52.31