Santa Barbara Named Second-Drunkest City in California

According to a ranking released by RoadSnacks, an editorial and data aggregation website, Santa Barbara is the second-drunkest city in California. The first-place title belongs to Santa Monica, while the rest of the toppers, such as Napa and El Cajon, hail from both northern and southern California.

RoadSnacks implemented a series of criteria that define a “drunk city” as one with a high number of bars or pubs, wineries, and liquor stores per capita. The site also considers more abstract data, such as the number of “each city’s drunk-related tweets within the last week” and “each city’s divorce rate.” Santa Barbara has an 11.09 percent divorce rate, the third-highest bars-per-capita ranking in the state, and the fifth-highest liquor-stores-per-capita ranking in the state. The site does not mention Santa Barbara’s close proximity to UCSB, but 8 of the 10 drunkest cities on the list are located within 10 miles of a 4-year university.

Roadsnacks’ reasoning for considering divorce rates? Multiple studies have concluded that if one or both partners in a marriage are alcoholics, the marriage is three times more likely to end in a divorce. And Roadsnacks’ methodology behind Twitter? In order to count alcohol-related tweets within a city, the website used both the geolocation and hashtag features of the social media outlet. Analysts tallied all the geolocatable tweets in a city included any hashtag from the list of “#Drunk,” “#Party,” “#Beer,” “#Wine,” and “#Cocktails.”