Top 20 cities for drunken driving offenders
The top cities for DUIs | City | Rank in 2010 | | 1. San Diego | 1 | | 2. Los Angeles | 7 | | 3. Indianapolis | 6 | | 4. Jacksonville | 10 | | 5. San Francisco | 8 | | 6. Charlotte | 3 | | 7. San Jose | 2 | | 8. Fort Worth | 14 | | 9. Columbus | 5 | | 10. Phoenix | 4 | | 11. Austin | 9 | | 12. Dallas | 12 | | 13. Houston | 13 | | 14. New York | 17 | | 15. Chicago | 19 | | 16. San Antonio | 11 | | 17. Philadelphia | 16 | | 18. Memphis | 15 | 19. Baltimore
| 18 | | 20. Detroit 20 [Compare car insurance quotes now.] Source and methodology: Insurance.com/Insurance.com based its list on the top 20 cities by population, according to the Census Bureau. (No data was available for Massachusetts.) We then looked at people in those cities who requested car insurance quotes at Insurance.com and CarInsurance.com, and calculated the percentage of people in each city who reported having at least one alcohol-related violation. | |
California dreamin' may mean cruising down the highway and partying like a Hollywood celebrity, but if you mix the two, you could face a sobering reality.
Three of the nation's top five locations for big-city DUI citations are in California, according to Insurance.com data on DUI citations in 20 of the nation's largest U.S. cities for Nov. 1, 2010, to Oct. 31, 2011.
The top five cities are:
- San Diego
- Los Angeles
- Indianapolis
- Jacksonville, Fla.
- San Francisco
However, having a high percentage of DUI offenders does not necessarily mean a city has more boozers than other cities. A city may rank near the top of the DUI citation list for a number of reasons, including a lack of public transportation, or a police force that's good at doings its job – or both.
Peter Moraga, spokesman for the Insurance Information Network of California, speculates that California leads in DUI citations because it's a "car-centric state," and law enforcement officials are "very attuned to the danger of driving under the influence."
The issue is "on their radar constantly, especially during the holidays," Moraga says.
For the nation as a whole in 2009, about one-third of all accident fatalities--or nearly 11,000 people--occurred in crashes that involved a driver with a blood alcohol level of at least 0.08 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nationwide, there were 1.4 million DUI arrests in 2010, according to the FBI.
This is the second year in a row San Diego led the list in our study. For 2009-2010, other California cities that made the list included San Jose (second) and Los Angeles and San Francisco (seventh and eighth, respectively). This year, San Jose dropped out of the top five and now sits in seventh place.
Meanwhile, Indianapolis ranked sixth last year, while Jacksonville, Fla., ranked 10th.