These are the worst freeways in Southern California: An L.A. Times rankings

1Southern California is world famous for its love-hate relationship with freeways. From the annual Thanksgiving jam on the 405 to one-offs like 2011’s Carmageddon incident, L.A.’s roads are always a main character in the city’s story.

We set out to rank these freeways and highways once and for all.

Though no metric is perfect, our approach combines some of the most important data points on freeways — average speed of cars, delays, lost productivity and fatalities — to approximate the worst and best stretches of road in Southern California. We also selected specific stretches of freeway to measure, and those may or may not line up with your commute. We used a year of data from 2022, which is the most recent available. For all these reasons, our rankings are subjective but they represe