Here’s where to find the nation’s best and worst drivers

Not surprisingly, smaller cities tend to have safer drivers than larger ones.

Despite the introduction and widespread adoption of accident avoidance technology in new cars, an estimated 6,452,000 U.S. drivers got into wrecks during 2017 (the most recent year for which this information is available). Apparently, if you want to avoid being a statistic, steer clear of Baltimore, Maryland and head for Brownsville Texas, which are the cities having the most- and least-accident-prone drivers in the nation, respectively.

That factoid comes from the annual America’s Safe Drivers Report issued by Allstate Insurance in Northbrook, IL. The report ranks the nation’s 200 metropolitan areas according to their residents’ average collision frequencies. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, preventable human factors, like drunk, distracted and drowsy driving, speeding and failure to use safety features, contribute to 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes.

According to the report, the areas the safest drivers call home tend to be less densely populated and situated in western states. In Brownsville, drivers go for an average of nearly 15 years between auto accidents. Perhaps not surprisingly, you’ll find the worst drivers concentrated in some of the country’s largest and busiest burgs. Baltimore motorists tend to get into a crash an average of every 4.19 years. According to Allstate claims data, the average driver in the U.S will experience a collision once every 10.57 years.

Among the safest drivers’ list, the states of Kansas and Texas are represented with three cities each, with two metro areas each from Florida and Colorado. At the other end of the spectrum, there are no fewer than six California cities among the 15 most crash prone areas, with another three coming from Massachusetts.

We’re highlighting the 10 cities having the safest and most-accident prone motorists in the accompanying boxes. The latter list includes which stretches of road within the area are responsible for the most crashes. In Baltimore’s case it’s Highway 695.

Allstate researchers analyzed property damage claims reported during the two-year period of January 2016 to December 2017. The report defines a collision as any auto crash resulting in a property damage claim. You can read the full report at allstate.com.