Plymouth is worst city for parking stress

And Exeter is ninth

Plymouth is the worst city in the country to find a parking spot, according to a survey from an insurance company.

It even outranks London boroughs for stressed-out drivers.

Admiral analysed 157,868 tweets looking for words related to parking, such as ‘parking spot', 'car park', or 'parking meter'.

From that they used a piece of IT wizardry to estimate the stress levels in the people using the social media platform, assessing them on a scale of -1 to -5 (very highly stressed), based on the classification of words related to stress, frustration, anxiety, anger and negativity.   

They looked at all cities in the UK and London boroughs too, excluding places with fewer than 500 tweets.

In Plymouth, a third (32 per cent) of tweets about parking scored as 'stressed' or 'highly stressed.'

Exeter isn't far behind, ranking ninth in the UK, with 27 per cent of similarly negative tweets.

Overall, cities in the south west make up 40 per cent of the top 10 list, making it the most stressful region to find parking.

As the survey doesn't cover people too stressed to bother tweeting, or who don't use Twitter, Devon's two cities could well hide a pressure cooker of frustrated motorists.

Almost half of people in the UK have a Twitter account, although not all use the social media channel regularly.

More information about Admiral and its PR survey are here: https://www.admiral.com/car-insurance