By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Washington, D.C. and Baltimore landed at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on Allstate’s 2026 “America’s Best Drivers Report,” a list nobody wants to top. Boston claimed the dubious No. 1 spot, with Worcester and Springfield, Massachusetts rounding out the five most collision-prone cities in the country. The ranking has become an annual ritual for the DMV: this is the same bottom-six lineup — Boston, D.C., Baltimore, Worcester, Springfield, and Glendale, California — that Allstate published in 2025.
The report, released July 1, measures property damage claims filed across the 200 most populous U.S. metro areas from January 2023 through December 2024, translating claim frequency into an estimate of how many years pass, on average, between collisions for a driver in each city. Allstate’s own book of business represents roughly 10 percent of U.S. auto policies.
By that measure, a Washington driver can expect a collision every 4.24 years — a collision likelihood 156.3 percent above the national average. A Baltimore driver fares only slightly better: 4.49 years between crashes, 142.1 percent above average. Nationally, the average driver goes 10.86 years between collisions.
The suburbs don’t escape the list. Alexandria, Virginia ranks 12th riskiest nationally (6.21 years between collisions, 75 percent above average), and Arlington ranks 34th (7.61 years, 42.8 percent above average) — though Arlington’s ranking fell 20 spots from last year, one of the steeper year-over-year drops in the report. Allstate also flagged the D.C. area, along with Northern Virginia, as among the highest in the country for nighttime driving, and D.C. specifically as one of the highest for phone use behind the wheel, alongside Miami, Chicago, and Boston.
What the Claims Data Doesn’t Capture
Allstate’s ranking is a claims-frequency snapshot, not a fatality count — a distinction worth holding onto before drawing conclusions about whether DMV roads are getting more dangerous or less.
State crash data tells a different part of the story. According to Maryland’s Zero Deaths dashboard, maintained by the MDOT Motor Vehicle Administration’s Highway Safety Office, Maryland has recorded 226 traffic fatalities statewide year-to-date as of August 3, 2026 — down from 277 over the same period in 2025, an 18-percent decline. That’s a meaningfully better trajectory than the flat Allstate ranking would suggest on its own, and it lines up with a broader trend: comparing this year’s Allstate report to 2025’s, both D.C. and Baltimore actually posted longer average gaps between collisions (D.C. improved from 3.87 to 4.24 years; Baltimore from 4.17 to 4.49), even though neither city moved in the rankings. Allstate itself notes that the gap between the safest and riskiest U.S. cities is widening even as the average city has seen a modest decline in collisions since 2015 — meaning the DMV’s position near the bottom may say as much about the trajectory of other American cities as it does about local roads.
Statewide, Maryland’s five-year crash averages (2019–2023, per MDOT-SHA data processed through the Automated Crash Reporting System) show 535 fatal crashes and 107,886 total crashes a year. Distraction is the single largest identified factor in that data — 197 fatal crashes and roughly 14,833 injury crashes a year on average — followed by speed (91 fatal crashes/year) and impairment (142 fatal crashes/year involving alcohol or drugs). Those factors track closely with what Allstate’s Drivewise telemetry data flagged for the region: elevated nighttime driving and phone use in the D.C. metro specifically.
“Claims-frequency rankings and fatality-rate rankings don’t always agree.”
Maryland’s Numbers Are Moving in One Direction — D.C.’s in the Other
The starkest contrast in this year’s data isn’t between Maryland and Massachusetts — it’s between Maryland and the District next door.
Maryland’s statewide fatality count fell below 500 last year for the first time since 2014, and state officials say this year is tracking further improvement: the Zero Deaths dashboard’s 226-vs-277 year-to-date comparison (an 18-percent decline through August 3) is consistent with what MVA Administrator Chrissy Nizer has been telling reporters through the summer. “We’ve seen two years of reductions of deaths on our roadways, and that certainly is progress, but we’re not going to be satisfied until we reach zero fatalities,” Nizer said in late July, after a spell that included four fatal Baltimore City crashes and four in Baltimore County in a single month. Nizer has also been direct about the leading cause: “Nearly a third of all fatal crashes in our state are tied to speeding, and what some see as a traffic issue is actually a public health issue.” Maryland Transportation Secretary Katie Thomson and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller echoed the point at the campaign’s July 8 launch, with Miller calling the choice to obey posted speed limits “the difference between life and death.” Gov. Moore framed the campaign — which pairs billboards and public messaging with a month of high-visibility police enforcement — as “a refusal to accept the status quo,” and state police say they’ve issued more than 4,600 citations this year to drivers going 30+ mph over the limit.
Washington is telling a very different story. According to Metropolitan Police Department data, the District recorded 25 traffic fatalities as of July 23, 2026 — up 127 percent from 11 at the same point in 2025, and putting the city on pace for its deadliest year in recent memory. That reversal comes after D.C. had posted its lowest annual fatality total since 2012 (25 deaths) in 2025, down sharply from 52 in each of the two years prior. Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the Council’s Transportation Committee, has pointed to Vision Zero progress as fragile: “Just as we’re lowering traffic injuries & deaths,” he wrote, warning against rolling back enforcement tools.
“Maryland’s statewide fatality count fell below 500 last year for the first time since 2014.”
That warning is aimed squarely at a live fight in Washington over the District’s automated speed and red-light camera network — a program Republicans in Congress have targeted as, in the words of one House member, “a shameless money grab” that hits commuters from Maryland and Virginia especially hard. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s office has already won judgments against out-of-state drivers, including 15 from Maryland and Virginia totaling more than $600,000 in unpaid fines, according to reporting on the District’s cross-border enforcement push. The Federal Highway Administration’s own research, cited in coverage of the fight, found camera-enforced corridors saw steep reductions in crashes — but critics counter that the District’s camera map skews toward high-revenue placements in majority-Black neighborhoods, citing a 2019 finding that drivers there were far more likely to be ticketed than in majority-white areas. DDOT Director Sharon Kershbaum has argued cameras alone aren’t sufficient for the most reckless drivers: “The cameras only go so far for the most egregious drivers… those are the same ones who are going to be causing the fatal crash.”
“The cameras only go so far for the most egregious drivers.”
Zooming out regionally, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments’ Transportation Planning Board reached a sobering conclusion in a five-year study through 2023: fatal crashes across the region rose steadily even as total crash counts didn’t necessarily track the same way, with pedestrians accounting for roughly 29 percent of the region’s traffic deaths and the inner suburbs — not the urban core — showing the highest fatality rate per capita.
A Reputation With History — and a Methodology Worth Interrogating
“Baltimore’s presence near the bottom of Allstate’s list isn’t new.”
Baltimore’s presence near the bottom of Allstate’s list isn’t new. The city was Allstate’s single worst-ranked city in both the 2018 and 2019 reports, when it averaged roughly four years between claims against a national average that was then closer to 10.5 years — nearly identical to this year’s gap, suggesting a genuinely durable pattern rather than a one-year blip. An MDOT-SHA spokesman responding to that 2018 ranking urged drivers to avoid rushing or aggressive behavior, a message state officials are still repeating in 2026’s “Slow The Fast Down” campaign.
“The two studies aren’t measuring the same thing.”
But claims-frequency rankings and fatality-rate rankings don’t always agree — a distinction worth flagging for readers before they conclude Baltimore’s roads are uniquely lethal. A separate Forbes Advisor analysis using NHTSA’s Fatality and Injury Reporting System, which measures fatal-crash rates per 100,000 residents rather than insurance-claim frequency, placed Baltimore in the middle of the pack (32nd of 50 major cities) and D.C. near the safe end (45th of 50) on fatal-crash and impaired-driving metrics. The two studies aren’t measuring the same thing: Allstate counts how often Allstate policyholders in a metro file a property-damage claim, which captures fender-benders and non-fatal collisions far more than it captures deaths. That’s a legitimate independent risk signal for insurance purposes, but it shouldn’t be read interchangeably with “most dangerous,” and a rigorous piece should hold both data sets side by side rather than defaulting to whichever ranking is more dramatic.
The Policy Backdrop
The Allstate ranking lands squarely inside Maryland’s own “Slow The Fast Down” push, part of the state’s broader Zero Deaths Maryland / Vision Zero initiative.
An Allstate agency owner in Anne Arundel County, quoted in regional coverage of the report, said the volume of claims reflects something agents “see daily” in a growing metro area. A D.C.-based Allstate agent suggested separately that the pattern may reflect commuter and non-resident driving as much as District residents themselves — a claim that would benefit from MVA or DDOT commuter-flow data if it’s going to anchor a section of the piece.
Sources: Allstate’s 2026 and 2025 “America’s Best Drivers Report” (Allstate Newsroom, PRNewswire); Maryland Zero Deaths / MDOT Motor Vehicle Administration Highway Safety Office crash dashboard (zerodeathsmd.gov); MDOT-State Highway Administration statewide crash summary data (2019–2023); Governor’s Office and MVA press materials on the “Slow The Fast Down” campaign; Metropolitan Police Department traffic fatality data (mpdc.dc.gov); Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Transportation Planning Board regional roadway safety study; Forbes Advisor NHTSA-based city safety analysis; reporting from the Washington Post, Washington Times, Washingtonian, CBS Baltimore, WMAR-2 News, The BayNet, Detroit News/Gannett, Gelb & Gelb legal analysis, and Carrier Management.
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