NEWS

Jacksonville second-worst city to drive in, according to Waze

Christopher Hong

To the shell-shocked driver trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the roads and bridges of our quaint southern town became a gridlocked hellhole, you’re not alone.

Jacksonville was ranked the second-worst place in America to drive in a study released Friday by Waze, a popular navigation app.

The study was based on Waze’s “Driver Satisfaction Index,” which the company says is created by asking “millions” of active app users to rate traffic, safety, and road qualities on a scale from 1 to 10.

Ten is Satisfying. One is Miserable. Jacksonville’s score came in at 5.69, better only than Honolulu and worse than Los Angeles and Portland, two notoriously congested cities.

Besides a brief description of Waze’s index, a spokesperson for the company offered no other explanation for the city’s low ranking in an email pitching local journalists to write about the findings.

In recent months, drivers have been subjected to an ever-changing rotation of bridge closures, route detours and other inconveniences associated with road work.

Like most other “best-of” of “worst-of” lists released by private companies, the rankings are not the result of actual statistical science and likely are created for marketing purposes.

Still, city and business leaders have been quick to celebrate Jacksonville’s positive rankings in prior “listicles.”

Mayor Lenny Curry in June touted Jacksonville landing second on Business Insiders list 10 US cities where everyone wants to live right now. “We r getting things done,” he wrote on Twitter.

Former Mayor Alvin Brown centered televesion ads for his 2015 campaign around a 2014 report from WalletHub that declared Jacksonville as the best city in America to start a business. The company released its 2015 report in the middle of the campaign, and it saw Jacksonville drop to 58th.