Insurance company Allstate just released their 2013 America’s Best Drivers Report, and Seattle has actually slipped in the rankings from last year, down six spots to 160th out of 200 cities. (In 2012, we were 154th.) You know that little old lady from Pasadena? She’s worse: 165th.
Absolute worst, like a bald-tired rocket with a DUI pilot, is Washington, DC.
These rankings are based up on the rate of collisions compared to a national average. In DC, drivers average only 4.8 years between accidents; that’s worse than Newark! In Seattle, 7.8 years. Tacoma, 8.1 years (up 12 in the rankings from last year). In safe-and-sane Fort Collins, claiming the #1 spot, 13.9 years.
But, a few caveats. Pretty much every city in the top ten has population between 150,000 and 250,000, so there seems to be a strong correlation between population size and good driving.
Secondly, the report covers a two-year period, but Seattle’s collision rate has dropped, from a high of almost 14,500 annual incidents in 2005 and 2006, to about 11,340 in both 2010 and 2011. Statewide there was a similar trend, from a high of almost 119,000 collisions in 2007, to a 2011 low of less than 99,000.
And, more importantly, this data really only describes the risk of an accident in a given area, not the competency of an area’s driver population. It’s possible, after all, that a subset of bad drivers is spoiling the curve for everyone. To better gauge overall driver competency, you would want to break out repeat colliders, for instance.
Consider this vehicular assault case from March, via Seattle Bike Blog, when a 24-year-old doing 60 mph down Alaskan Way crashed into a cyclist. There’s an important coda to the story: “Gilstrom has been stopped for speeding or reckless driving three times in the past five years.”
That same March, a drunk driver drove into a family crossing NE 75th Street, resulting in multiple fatalities. As the Seattle Times later reported, the man was driving with a suspended license after two DUI arrests.
Everyone has daily “terrible driver” stories to tell, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see which cities were best at driver education, traffic law enforcement, and preventing demonstrably unsafe drivers from terrorizing others?
