Study ranks I-10 as Southern California's worst freeway

A new study has ranked 25 of Southern California's freeways from best to worst, with a not-so-surprising thoroughfare finding itself at the bottom of the list. 

Traffic has long been a term synonymous with the region, so the Los Angeles Times conducted a study to determine which freeways drivers hate and tolerate by looking at a number of different factors. Though no commuters will ever be able to quite agree on which roads give them the biggest headache, the study provides a fairly concrete look at why some rank so much higher than others. 

The bottom-ranked freeway came as no surprise to many. With a whopping -1300 on their scale, the Times ranked I-10 as the worst freeway around, with more than double the negative rating as I-605, the second-worst freeway. 

The Times used Cal Trans data available from 2022 to run the study, which was overseen by reporter Terry Castleman and deputy managing editor Shelby Grad. They scaled scores so that an average freeway's ranking would be zero, while the best are around 500, according to the report.

"The factors that we used were a Q rating, or the average speed of every car to use the freeway over a one-year period, as well as the hours lost to delays on that road, the lost productivity caused by those delays and then finally a metric for number of fatalities on the road in a given year, all scaled by how many cars use the road and how long the road is," Castleman said while speaking with CBS News Los Angeles.

While they do note that the rankings are subjective, the Times' results are hard to argue with. Here are the final results of their study, ranked from best to worst: 

1. State Route 261
2. State Route 90
3. State Route 241
4. State Route 126
5. I-15 Freeway
6. State Route 73
7. State Route 118
8. State Route 71
9. State Route 170
10. I-5 Freeway
11. State Route 134
12. State Route 22
13. I-105 Freeway
14. I-210 Freeway
15. I-215 Freeway
16. U.S. 101 Freeway
17. State Route 55
18. State Route 60
19. State Route 57
20. I-110 Freeway
21. I-710 Freeway
22. State Route 91
23. I-405 Freeway
24. I-605 Freeway
25. I-10 Freeway.