Panama - The best place to retire… not the best place to drive

According to the Driver Satisfaction Index, completed by the traffic and navigation application Waze, Panama is fourth on a long list of the worst countries to be behind the wheel. Waze analyzed driver experience in 28 countries and 238 cities, ranking driver experience from 10 for satisfactory to 1 for very bad.

Through their millions of active users, Waze determined the hardest place to be a driver was El Salvador, followed by the Philippines, Guatemala, Panama, Indonesia, Peru, Singapore, and Colombia. The report found the best place to be in the driver seat was the Netherlands followed by France, the United States, the Czech Republic, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Italy.

According to the report, Waze has more than 65 million active users in 185 countries. The study focuses on countries with over 20,000 users per month, in order to ensure that data was accurate and the comparisons, fair.

The evaluation was conducted from six factors: traffic, both its density and its severity; the quality of roads and infrastructure; the safety of the roads, which includes the frequency of accidents, obstacles on the road, weather, and climate.

Traffic and driver services in Panama ranked poorly between 1.1 and 2.50 points, while the quality of roads ranked at an average of 7.25 points and safety on the road at 6.15 points both which seem high considering the daily driving experience in Panama City and throughout the country.