It seems we have a new reason to raise a glass tonight: Santa Monica has won “by a landslide” in a ranking for Drunkest Cities in California.
The honor comes from the site RoadSnacks, which found that there are more bars per capita in Santa Monica than anywhere else in the state.
But that’s not all that made us number one in carousing. Criteria included five benchmarks: number of bars and pubs per capita, number of wineries per capita, number of liquor stores per capita, each city’s drunk-related tweets within the past week and each city’s divorce rate.
They counted geo-located tweets, measuring the following raw number of tweets that came from within a city’s general area: #Drunk, #Party, #Beer, #Wine and #Cocktails.
The ranking comes at a time when policymakers in Bay City are seeking more ways to hinder teenagers from underage drinking through Social Host Laws. Experts have suggested that while Santa Monica’s “hospitality-oriented” leaning may be fun for tourists and younger residents, minors have been affected by this lifestyle, too.
Santa Barbara, Napa, Pasadena, Sacramento, Newport Beach, Oakland, Livermore, San Mateo, and El Cajon rounded out the top ten drunkest California towns.