LLOYD: Just how bad are Utah drivers?
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- Traffic moves along on southbound I-15 in Riverdale on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025.
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- Jared Lloyd
Let’s talk about driving in Utah.
Everyone has their opinion about just how bad overall drivers in Utah are, with many who say Utahns are among the worst.
But national groups who study the topic are remarkably conflicted on the topic.
Take LendingTree, for example, which used “tens of millions of QuoteWizard by LendingTree auto insurance inquiries from Jan. 1 through Sept. 30, 2025. To determine the best and worst drivers by state, researchers calculated the number of driving incidents per 1,000 drivers in every state based on the residences listed on those insurance inquiries. This main category included accidents, DUIs, speeding-related incidents and general citations.”
It’s verdict, released last December, was that Utah has the third-worst drivers in the country with 54.6 incidents per 1,000 drivers. Only North Dakota (64) and New Jersey (58.8) are worse than we are here in the Beehive State.
But then there is the study done by Munley Law in Pennsylvania based on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, focusing specifically on rates of motor vehicle traffic fatalities, DUI arrest rates, fatal crashes, pedestrians killed by motor vehicles, motor carrier traffic violations, and the percentage of uninsured motorists.
Guess where they rank Utah?
They say our state is the third-safest in the nation to drive in, behind only New York and Massachusetts.
OK, so which is it? Is Utah the third-worst or the third-best when it comes to driving?
It all depends on what metrics you are looking at (another example of why you should always take all studies and polls with a grain of salt because the data is always going to be applied selectively).
Personally, I just laugh whenever I see these “studies” and their rankings.
I’ve personally driven a car in all 50 of the United States as well as Washington, D.C., and to me all of the metrics these studies use never truly tell the story of what makes driving “safe” or “dangerous” in various locations.
In my experience, there are enormous differences between urban and rural driving, regardless of what state you are in.
Rural drivers often have a sense of freedom, with some being willing to go far too fast. Limited vehicles make accidents more infrequent — but the speeds and conditions can make them much more damaging and even deadly.
When you get into population centers, you see more frustration with traffic jams — which are much more common — and drivers at either end of the spectrum stand out. Some are extremely aggressive and take insane risks to try to gain a few seconds, while others are just tooling along in whatever lane they think is best, oblivious to the laws and even common sense.
Another driving factor that is almost impossible to quantify in these studies is weather, which can be wildly different depending on the season, the year and the location. I’ve driven in torrential downpours in the South, in ice storms in the Midwest as well as — of course — the blizzards of the mountains and the blisteringly hot days in the deserts.
Drivers forget how to handle conditions or have traction issues or are unable to see properly. That leads to dangerous situations and innumerable accidents.
No matter where you go, you will have bad drivers. You will have those who go too fast or too slow, who fail to recognize conditions and far, far too many who are distracted.
But, as a driver with extensive experience in a lot of places in the USA, here is my two cents on where I think Utah ranks: I’d put it in the top third.
Utah drivers are far from perfect, certainly, but they aren’t too bad. I see drivers being kind to each other more than I see them acting out.
Now for the other end of the spectrum.
I would probably give the dubious honor of the worst state to drive in the nation to Florida, purely because of the Miami area.
Drivers there regularly cross four, five, six lanes of traffic without any signaling, so you have to constantly have your head on a swivel because you never know who is going where.
Even trying to be prepared isn’t always enough, as I found out on one trip where a car cut across five lanes and I simply couldn’t avoid them despite my best effort. After the fender-bender (no injuries, thankfully), that other vehicle proceeded to wait for law enforcement in the middle of an off-ramp, nearly getting hit a dozen more times.
When returning the damaged vehicle to the rental car agency and talking to an agent about driving in Miami, they opined that immigrants from throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America all brought their worst driving habits with them.
That might be the case. I don’t have any international driving experience in those parts of the world yet, so I can’t say for myself — but I have heard horror stories.
Maybe driving in Utah really isn’t nearly as terrible as we sometimes think it is.
Jared Lloyd is the managing editor of the Standard-Examiner and can be reached at jlloyd@standard.net