Dublin is a highly stressful city in which to drive in according to new research, in fact it is considered amongst the most difficult across Europe to navigate.
Researchers measured heart rates of drivers in seven different cities across the continent.
DiscoverCars.com created the ranking by first creating an average of each driver’s lowest driving and resting heart rate, and highest driving and resting heart rate.
They thgen subtracted the average low rate from the average high rate to provide a number used as a ‘Stress Rating’.
As the second most stressful city for drivers, Dublin, Ireland has a Stress Rating of 9.5 - already quite a lot lower than the two cities in joint first place.
This driver’s heart rate while driving reached 130 bpm, but their resting heart rate also went as high as 126 bpm, which is higher than the normal range according to Dr Saheed.
While a high resting heart rate can be influenced by caffeine intake, it can also be the result of health conditions.
Drivers in Dublin have suggested major sources of stress include slow moving traffic on single lane roads.
Aleksandrs Buraks, Head of Growth at DiscoverCars.com, comments:
“This is a new instalment of a piece of research we undertook earlier this year, in which we compared different cities around Europe to find out which was the most stressful location to drive. We thought it was so interesting that we decided to repeat our research with seven new cities. We worked out each city’s ‘Stress Rating’ by comparing each driver’s resting and driving heart rate data.
“Out of the locations we studied this time, the two most stressful cities to drive in are Vienna, Austria and Zagreb, Croatia, both of which scored a Stress Rating of 25.5 - although neither proved as stressful as Oslo, Norway in our previous research, which came out with a Stress Rating of 37.5! At the opposite end of the scale, Tallinn, Estonia is the least stressful place to drive, scoring -1, by far the lowest score we have seen in our research so far.
“We have a few theories about what might have influenced these results, and one of them is that cities that are less densely populated might be more relaxing places to drive. We’re sure that anyone who has driven in a few different cities in their time would say this is often the case!”
