San Francisco is once again on the receiving end of a back-handed compliment.

This time, SF's drivers earned the distinction of being named the most dangerous of any large city in California. The ranking was based on data collected and analyzed by Liljegren Law Group and 1point21 Interactive.

The news comes just months after San Francisco and Oakland were jointly named by a national study as having the worst roads in the country.

The study focused on California cities with populations over 100,000, and ranked them based on things like collision frequency, hit-and-run rates, automotive fatality rates, and drunk-driving-related collisions.

The researchers also considered contributing factors to automotive collisions, like average annual rainfall, population density, and the percentage of young drivers (aged 15-29) as compared to the total population.

Even though San Francisco didn’t top the list in any individual metric, the third-party report determined that collectively, San Francisco's drivers are the worst.

San Francisco and Berkeley (which ranked #4) were outliers among Northern California cities in the study, which found that 14 of the 20 most dangerous driving cities in the state are in Southern California.



There were a couple of bright spots: zero NorCal cities, including SF, landed in the top five for drunk-driving-related collisions.

San Francisco also wasn’t in the top five cities for vehicular fatalities; that list was topped by San Bernardino, with more than three fatalities recorded for every 100 million vehicle miles driven. San Francisco came in at ninth on the list, with roughly 1.5 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles.

A hit-and-run at 18th and Eureka. | Photo: Steven Bracco/Hoodline

The report is one of a number in recent months that have called into question the feasibility of the city’s Vision Zero efforts, which aim to end all traffic fatalities in SF by 2024.

Last year, San Francisco was ranked in a different report as having the second-highest rate of pedestrian injury and death in the country.