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Driving can often be a great way to relax and unwind, cruising through back roads and listening to music or your favorite podcasts, but it is not always a pleasant experience. Many variables can factor in to whether or not a place is good for driving, from smooth and steady terrain compared to pothole-ridden highways to heavily-trafficked roads with bumper-to-bumper congestion or pleasant drives with nary another car in sight.
WalletHub compared some of the biggest cities in the America to determine which are the best to drive in and which are the worst. Five cities in North Carolina managed to make the cut, with all ranking among the best cities in the country to drive in, including one that took the top spot:
- No. 1: Raleigh
- No. 4: Greensboro
- No. 12: Winston-Salem
- No. 15: Durham
- No. 31: Charlotte
According to the report, Raleigh earned the top spot "largely because it's an inexpensive city ... [ranking] as the seventh-cheapest city when it comes to the average cost for a new care and the average parking rate."
These are the Top 10 best cities to drive in America, according to WalletHub:
- Raleigh, North Carolina
- Boise, Idaho
- Corpus Christi, Texas
- Greensboro, North Carolina
- Jacksonville, Florida
- Orlando, Florida
- Scottsdale, Arizona
- Wichita, Kansas
- Tampa, Florida
- Plano, Texas
To determine the list, WalletHub compared 100 of the largest cities in the U.S. across four factors: cost of ownership & maintenance, traffic & infrastructure, safety, and access to vehicles & maintenance. These factors were then evaluated using 30 relevant metrics, including cost of a new car, average gas prices, average parking rate, annual hours spend in congestion per auto commuter, number of days with precipitation, quality of roads, traffic fatality rate per 100,000 population, share of uninsured drivers, rate of car thefts, gas stations per capita and more.
Learn more about the best and worst cities in the country to drive in at WalletHub.com. You can also check out our previous coverage of the North Carolina road named the "most scenic drive" in the entire state.