Allstate insurance ranks American cities for most and least likely to have an auto accident

Allstate Insurance has released its annual ranking of the best and the worst cities for traffic accidents…

with Washington D.C. ranking as the city with the greatest likelihood of collisions, and Fort Collins, Colorado holding the distinction of having the lowest odds of a crash.

In order to rank the cities, the insurer compared the frequency of auto collisions with the population of the city. This provided Allstate with the average driver’s odds of being in an accident. They also compared that likelihood with the average for the country.

In Washington D.C., the average driver will have an accident every 4.8 years which is over two times as frequent as the average of the country, which is every 10 years. On the other end of the spectrum, the average driver in Fort Collins will have a traffic accident once every 14 years, which is 28 percent lower than the national average.

The importance of the average is that the premiums that are charged by an insurance company are affected by an individual’s likelihood to be involved in an accident.

Following Fort Collins as the safest driving cities were Lincoln, Nebraska and Boise, Idaho, and the residents of those areas can benefit from that fact. It was small and medium sized cities that were most frequently lower in traffic accidents. That said, among larger cities (those with a population greater than one million), Phoenix led the list of the safest cities, with an average of one accident every ten years for regular drivers.

That said, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Newark, and New York City were among the cities where drivers were most likely to be in a collision.