Fresno is lauded … but as a driver-friendly city?
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Bee file photo: Traffic starts to back up on Highway 41 near Shields Avenue in central Fresno during the daily commute.
Hey, here’s one of those pesky little “best and worst cities” lists that, for a refreshing change of pace, does NOT trash Fresno.
You wouldn’t know it from that jerk who cut you off on Blackstone Avenue just a few hours ago, but the folks at NerdWallet.com, a financial-literacy website, reported that Fresno is one of the 10 best cities for car drivers. Their number-crunching is based on how long motorists are stuck in traffic, how high gas prices are, and how overcrowded a city is. Fresno ranked at Number 10, behind Raleigh, N.C.; Bakersfield; Wichita, Kan.; Kansas City, Mo.; Tulsa, Okla.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Omaha, Neb.; El Paso, Texas; and Colorado Springs, Colo.
“Even though Fresno has a high population density, car drivers are only delayed by 15 hours per year on their daily commute,” NerdWallet reported on its finance blog over the weekend. “Gas prices hover around the national urban average. Additionally, you can use your car on the weekends to go exploring the nearby national parks, including Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon.
NerdWallet based its score in part on traffic delay figures from Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute. Among the cities in the Top 10, Fresno ranked behind only Bakersfield in estimates of how many hours per year the average driver is jammed up on the roadways. Texas A&M estimated that the average in Bakersfield was 12 hours a year, compared to 15 hours in Fresno.
Predictably, the automobile-clogged freeways of the Bay Area and Southern California resulted in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles being bogged down among the 10 worst cities for drivers. In each of those cities, drivers were estimated to be delayed in traffic jams for 61 hours — more than 1 1/2 work weeks — every year. The worst average delay was reported in Washington, D.C., at 67 hours a year.
When you look at it that way, it kind of makes the daily 5 o’clock clog on Highway 41 around the McKinley Curve look like a piece of cake, doesn’t it?
Responses
Compared to Toronto, Fresno driving is a piece of cake. Always appreciate it.
Man, this has got to be some bull crap. I’ve waited for at least 15 minutes per day on 99/180/41/99South for over 15 years. That’s 60 minutes per day. Per 5 days a week. That’s 300 minutes per week. Times 52 weeks in a year. That’s 260 hours per year. What kind of idiots do the idiots at Texas A&M think we are? Just because we live in Fresno does not mean our intelligence is less than that of a Canadian. I’m truly saddened at the reading public of the Fresno Bee who believes this monkey bull crap that is being put out on the airwaves. How about some real news like Glenn Beck? His show is called Real News from the Blaze. It’s in the title. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rant, but this really just bugs my ant hill.
-Fresh
I am glad that Fresno is a good driving city. I hope that this helps business. But this is also an inverted list. We all know that Fresno is designed and built for the automobile, and not people. This list in a way confirms that. Is this list really a good quality of life indicator? I am just glad that the Fresno Police Department does such a good with DUIs.