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Road damage can lead to car damage, which could mean big money out of pocket for repairs. According to AARP, potholes cause $3 billion dollars in damage to vehicles each year in the U.S.
Those divots in the road can eat up rims, pop a tire, damage your suspension or worse. AAA estimates that the average repair bill for a pothole-related incident is $306, but can reach over $1,000 in severe cases.
A recent study from QuoteWizard, an insurance shopping site from LendingTree, outlined what parts of the country have had the worst of potholes for the last 18 years.
Taking publicly available state-by-state search data for pothole complaints and repair inquiries going back to 2024, QuoteWizard came up with a search index average that was rounded out. That number represents the number of pothole-related searches in a particular state or city compared to others.
Nick VinZant, a data scientist at Quote Wizard, told Newsweek that barring a massive combing of municipal data or insurance data, Google Search Analytics provided the best way to establish where potholes are causing the most problems.
"Google Search Analytics is very good at giving you a per capita ranking of how prevalent a search is in one area compared to other ones," he explained.
At the top of the list is Washington, which scored a 66 on the search index average. That was followed by Indiana and Michigan with 65 and 54, respectively. Filling out the rest of the list was Nebraska, Ohio, Massachusetts, Illinois, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
At the city level, Yakima, Washington scored highest at 50 on the search index average. Runners up were Grand Junction, Colorado and Spokane, Washington at 40 and 39, respectively.
Other cities with outsized pothole problems were Lafayette, Indiana; Seattle; Burlington, Vermont; Reno, Nevada; Springfield, Massachusetts; Indianapolis and Omaha, Nebraska.
In November, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), paved the way for major infrastructure improvements, funding upgrades to America's roads, bridges and rails, in addition to other projects. According to the White House, 1 in 5 miles of highways and major roads, and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition.
