If you're planning on visiting Massachusetts and renting a car, consider paying extra for accident insurance. Allstate's "Best Drivers Report," which calculates the best and worst drivers in the US every year, found Boston to be the worst city for drivers in 2015. Using a calculation based on car collision frequency, the insurer found that Boston was 200th on a list of 200 cities studied, followed by nearby Worcester at No. 199 and Springfield, Mass., at No. 196.
However, Boston isn't the only city that has been singled out for bad driving. According to a 2013 Washington Post article, living in Washington, D.C. means that a driver is more than twice as likely to get into an accident than drivers anywhere else in the country.
On the bright side, Allstate found that the safest city for drivers was Kansas City, Kansas, where the average driver has a collision every 13.3 years. The national average is every 10 years.
More on auto accident rates:
- Kansas City was followed on the good drivers list by Brownsville, Texas; Boise, Idaho; and Fort Collins, Colorado.
- Large metropolitan areas in California also scored poorly. San Francisco ranked 193 and Los Angeles finished at 191 - not much better than Boston.
- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that 32,675 car crash fatalities occurred in 2014.