Hot damn, it’s here, it’s finally here! You can all stop emailing me and calling and showing up at my door and grabbing me by the shoulders when you see me in public, pinning me against a wall and demanding to know what the best and worst cities for van driving are! I’m sick of it! And you know damn well that I don’t get to make those rankings: only the van-driving experts at Money Super Market – which I think is some kind of UK-based insurance vendor, or something? The name sounds like some off-brand sketchy check-cashing place, so who the hell knows.
Point is, only Money Super Market’s world-renowned think tank of experts, computers, and hyper-intelligent, genetically-augmented chimpanzees has the authority to decide what the best and worst cities to drive a van in are, and anyone who disagrees or somehow doesn’t understand the gravity of this all is a miserable fool, and only the sting of the lash across their pitiful shoulders will be what they deserve.
Yes, Money Super Market’s Annual World’s Best and Worst Cities for Van Drivers list is here, and holy crap, is it shocking. Are you sitting down? If you’re standing, sit down. If you’re already sitting, make a litter of blankets and laundry and old carpet scraps and lay in that. If you’re already lying down, get a kiddie pool and fill it full of Easy Cheese and spray foam insulation, and burrow yourself into that. It’s the only way to be safe.
Okay, before we get into the rankings, let me reveal what Money Super Market’s criteria for deciding the best and worst van-driving cities are, because it’s thanks to their unique and scientifically rigorous metrics, rubrics, Rubik’s Cubes, and rude dicks that these flawless results can be obtained. Here’s how they pick the cities:
“Our rankings are based on five factors that shape a van driver’s enjoyment of a daily journey: congestion levels, driving-related fees like tolls and low-emission zones, access to petrol stations and EV charging points, ease of finding parking and how often road disruption like roadworks and closures get in the way. Each city was scored on these factors to give them an overall score.”
Now, I know what some of you lesser-informed folks may be thinking. “What the hell does this have to do with vans,” you’re probably whining, “aren’t all of these just generic ease-and-convenience-of-driving sort of criteria? There’s nothing van-specific about any of this?”
Okay, let’s address these questions, which, I’d like to add, are so stupid as to be insulting. You disgust me for even bringing them up. Clearly, there are things happening here beyond our mere mortal understanding. Money Soup Market absolutely and unquestionably knows what they are doing, and even if it seems like this whole thing is just some half-assed ploy to try and get some online mentions in websites, I promise you that there are unseen factors here that all but guarantee whatever criteria Mangy Slopper Markers is using to determine what cities are best or worse for van driving, those are the right criteria, now and forever. Whatever they pick, those are the right choices, and even questioning the logic of Mooney Snooper Merkin is a sin on par with spitting in the face of The Almighty himself.
Don’t fuck with me about this.
With that in mind, here’s their list of the Best cities to drive a van in:
Holy fucking shit crapballs urinal cakes mango chutney flapjacks. Turku? Turku? Finland has been priming Turku for this van-driving honor for the better part of a century! You know my main mayor Piia Elo is getting fucking wrecked right now on lonkero! She’s wanted this for so long, so good for you, muija.
Reykjavik has been a favorite among van drivers since before the Vikings landed there, and I’m fucking over the clamgrabbing moon to see a local hero, Lansing, on the list! Like it’s not enough to have all the glitz and glamour of Lansing, but they have to be America’s heaven of van driving, too? How do they pull it off?
I know a lot of you van drivers out there are already on Zillow looking up house prices in Bruges and Bratislava and Wroclaw, and so on. And I can’t say that’s a bad idea! Look, if Monkey Stupor Muppet says these are the best cities for driving vans, then fucking hell, do anything you can to get the hell out of whatever van-hating shithole you’re stuck in and get your ass to Minsk or Helsinki or Darwin! Leaving family behind? Friends? A promising career? Who gives a shit, we’re talking van driving here, and if Manny Stucker Marqis says it’s better for vans there, then you best listen.
Okay, now is the hard part. Here are the 10 cities across the globe that Moany Scooter Markup says are the worst for van-driving. Before you read this list, I would counsel you to please remember that there are people living in these cities, innocent people, who are as much the victims of the poor van-friendliness of these cities as you or I. I will not stand for calls for any of these cities’ destruction, no matter what. This list is meant to help, not draw a target on the back of these already severely blighted places. We cool?
I’m sad to see Mexico on this list so many times; that wonderful nation deserves better than this. I’ve driven in Mumbai, and I can’t say I’m too surprised to see them here, but it’s still disappointing. As tempting as it may be to just unleash vitriol and rage against these van-intolerant cities, I have to believe we’re better served trying to help, perhaps by organizing an airlift of some sort to try and get the unhappy vans and van owners out of these horrific nightmarish places. I think Manny Sucker Martinet already has some plans brewing, possibly in conjunction with the British Special Air Service (SAS).
It’s so hard to wrap my head around the sheer impact this list is going to have on the van-driving world. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few days, the International Siblinghood of Van Pilots convenes an emergency synod to discuss these findings, and possibly organize formal emigration plans from the less van-friendly countries to the most friendly ones, where they will likely set up Autonomous Van-Focused Oblast, with representatives from Munchy Slurper Marmoset holding positions of power in all of them.
Soon, this network of van-focused colonies will consolidate their power and take control of the entire Earth, which will be slowly but surely transformed into an idillic utopia for van driving. At any cost.
Will there be bloodshed? Possibly. Will the global economy and social order be changed forever? Absolutely. Will Mealy Succor Margaret find themselves on top of it all, when the dust settles? No question.
I, for one, welcome our new van-driving overlords.
Ok so Turku and Tampere are genuinely great places traffic-wise and at 3am in the summer you can just head 5mins out of town and find a perfectly empty sunny dirt road to test the Sprinter’s drift ability 🙂 love Finland!
Wroclaw is quite fun, it’s growing rapidly and has one huge ring road that the locals mostly ignore because they have faster routes cutting through the old wood/farmland with less speed cameras, not for the faint hearted mind…. Anyway, as a reformed White Van Man I must stand up for Welwyn Garden City, which must count by virtue of the name, or Hemel Hempstead that has the greatest roundabout around…. I think the Marsupial Stewing Marquis’ probably did alright tho, all things considered.
Having driven in five of the “best” list and one of the “worst” list I can say they are definitely bollocks.
Bruges? Belgian pave is literally the global benchmark for arse-destroying ride quality.
This is either AI generated or (checks date) yep, some unpaid student was banging this out in their last week before going back to Uni.
Hold it a sec. Isn’t Money Super Market that game show where contestants have a limited amount of time to run around a grocery store scooping groceries into a cart and the one with the most expensive total wins? It certainly seems like it better fits the name.
Second, is love to see the required metrics to qualify as I would bet my entire Shit box Show Down dollars for a month Arcata California would be on the list if not for shenanigans played on them by Icelandic Vikings. I mean Lansing is in Michigan which starts with an M, just like Minnesota, which is the NFL home of who? Yes the Vikings. That can’t be a coincidence. I defy Jason or any other person on Autopian, who isn’t as lazy as I am to compare Van Driving stats. I believe over 50% of the Arcata driving population not only drives Vans but old VW Vans. First time I went to the city center I thought it was a VW VAN car show
It’s great to have a van in Lansing so you can load up all your crap and move to Ann Arbor.
This is the sort of news that cries out for the Super Karate Monkey Death Car.
Is that some kind of trunk monkey upgrade?
The report says it was published 27 August.
You’ve been sitting on this for A WEEK???
You monster!
I’m pretty sure I live in a van-hating hell hole, but somehow we didn’t make the list.
I’ve been in Turku, albeit on a motorbike. Pretty chill place to drive, yup.
I’m shocked that Vancouver (the B.C. one, not the other one) didn’t make the list. It’s a perfect van/city match. A way to get around and something to live in. And, DUH!, the name. It’s often even just referred to as Vancity.
These Money-whatever people really have to be replaced with AI or something…
Don’t they issue a Delica with every BC driver’s license?
Traffic, while not horrifying, is pretty miserable anywhere near the bridges.
The whole place is all bridges, though.
Vancouver, WA was named and incorporated first. The Canadian locale is actually the other one.
Vancouver WA no longer exists. I looked on Google Maps, it’s labelled Canadatown now.
That’s fair.
I don’t know what to say that won’t get me in trouble, but many Americans hate the guy too. It was really nice not having to hear about him every day for a couple years.
It seems like they might want to take into account streets that vans can go down. I’m sure Bruges has streets most vans can’t go down even the driver starts speaking French instead of Flemish or English.
Minsk is logical full of bread boxes. With crumbling infrastructure built for bread boxes.
Don’t bury the lede, Jason, what did you drive in Mumbai?
I wonder exactly how many members needed the link to explain Easy Cheese. Seems like a lot of overlap there.
*David Tracy raises his hand.
On the one hand isn’t his mother German? Even if she was shopping at the base commissary instead of a German supermarket, she probably wasn’t buying it.
On the other, he was living single for a long time, the era which gave us shower spaghetti.
By “Vans” do they mean minivans, VW Type 2s and European MPVs as well? What about the Mazda 5 and the Colt Vista? Have those owners been consulted? We need more data!
Finally huh, was there really anyone waiting on baited breath for these results?
Are you kidding? This is all anyone has been talking about for MONTHS!
The viewing party was off the hook!
The Goodyear Blimp was there! Torch bungie jumped from it!
Oh no – as one of the design architects of the Petronas Towers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronas_Towers) in Kuala Lumpur, I feel some responsibility for adding too many people to the urban core and degrading the van experience. My humble apologies to Malaysia.
That is really cool!
Are the Petronas towers really not parallel, or is it some sort of optics illusion? They seem wonky, but also it was really hot and I needed to get back in somewhere with AC, or a country with a more forgiving climate.
Our guide said one of them was built wrong, but he only had a hit rate of about 30% with facts.
The best tour guides will always make up facts. No matter how many times you take the same tour with the same guide, you’ll always walk away thinking, “I didn’t know that! Now I get to tell all my friends that I learned that monkeys elect a new mayor to run their market every year.”
Best advice I ever got from a tour guide was in NYC: “If you get hungry in Times Square, walk three blocks in any direction.That’ll get you to the real New York street food.”
I used to be a tour guide at the Lotus factory. I told a bunch of people that the Lotus Evora held the world record for having the world’s smallest bonnet/hood.
Also I’d tell them that any car with a dust sheet over it was a secret prototype I couldn’t talk about.
They better have been built parallel!!! They actually sway a bit, sometimes in different directions, that’s why you need that piston structure under the bridge which has a slip connection at each end.
Another fun fact: they hired 2 different contractors to build each tower. I think one was Japanese and the other Korean, knowing they would be competitive to finish first. But rather than start them at the same time, they gave one contractor a month or so head start knowing they would go as fast as possible to stay ahead while the other went all out to catch up. Pretty clever
Ah, the tour guide said the contractors were from different countries but only got one of them right. They were also wildly racist about the workers from the country that didn’t even work on it.
I wish I hadn’t had such a stressful job to do while I was out there, it seemed like a lovely country.
I’ve definitely driven a van in Lansing, and i gotta say it’s pretty great.
Now I know where to do my ‘Free Candy’ van tour !!
No Russian cities? With all of those Ivans?
Belarus has a lot of them, too. That may be another explanation why Minsk made the list.
Great van pics, especially the beach one.
It is my firm belief that they simply looked at a number of random pictures showing street scenes from equally random cities and counted the vans in the pictures.
At least that would explain how Minsk made the list, as it’s full of Bukhankas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ-452
What if the Mealy Succor Margaret you knew lost his way? What if… one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore. What if… when he left the belly of the van, and opened the gates of Bogota, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a van, an offering of peace, that they took into their garage. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Bogota was to burn the world-entire. Including his van. What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain-and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow-what if he knew exactly what he’d done?
I hear the Burning Van event will be held soon in northern California
Nah, too much pollution, it’s next door in Nevada.
Thrilled to see Lansing crack the top ten. V8 van burnouts with Big Gretch at the governor’s mansion tonight!
The overall scores tied with Wroclaw means they sure aren’t 0-60 times. I can see a Chevy Express doing an 8.2sec run but not a Tarpan Honker. At least not without serious modification.
I demand a recount! Lansing, but not East Lansing?
This is a travesty. A travesty of a sham. A travesty of a sham of an injustice!
I think you guys have it wrong. As the MoneySuperMarket article only discussed the top 5, I think they’re referring to Lansing, Iowa or Lansing, New York.
Both of those are excellent van driving locales.
I can only assume the worst cities are not down by the river.
Well, shit. The more you know. Also, I want to thank MSM for putting in the work. I identify as Van (there are dozens of us) and the work they do keeps us safer. Like the ADL or the Greenbook for these worrying times.