Even if you’re not from New England, you’ve probably heard Boston has the worst drivers. As someone who was born in Boston and raised just north of the city, I also grew up hearing this, despite being told by friends and family that this was absolutely untrue. If anything, every other city has bad drivers, so when they come into Boston, it’s those out-of-towners making Bostonians look bad. While that may be how the great people of Boston want to justify things, the stats don’t lie.
According to Allstate’s 2026 America’s Best Drivers Report, which ranks the 200 largest U.S. cities based on auto insurance claims and analysis of driving behaviors such as speeding, hard braking, phone use, and nighttime driving, Boston is the most collision-prone city in the U.S., with drivers going only 3.76 years between car crashes. To put that into perspective, in Brownsville, Texas, drivers go almost 15 years between collisions, making them the best drivers, or at least the safest, in Allstate’s ranking. Not only are Boston drivers 189% more likely to have a car crash than the national average, but rounding out the top five riskiest cities for drivers after Boston are Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Springfield, Massachusetts, respectively. Considering all these cities are in the Northeast, it does make one wonder what’s in the water there — besides a boatload of lobster and crab.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Boston has made the list. When Allstate released the 2025 America’s Best Drivers Report (via PR Newswire), it revealed that Boston also had the worst drivers in 2015, implying that 2026 could be the 11th year in a row that Boston came in last. While a different study named the popular vacation destination of Hawaii as the state with the worst drivers in the country, at least Boston is just one city with a population of less than 675,000 residents.
Boston’s traffic and street layout is absolute chaos
Boston traffic is a disaster. According to the 2022 Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard (via the Boston Globe), Boston’s traffic-related congestion is the fourth worst in the world, sitting just behind other notoriously congested cities like London, Chicago, and Paris. Naturally, this can lead to fender-benders or, even worse, road rage. Boston also has an infamously bad layout of streets. While New York has its relatively easy-to-navigate grid of streets, Boston’s streets seem to have been built with no rhyme or reason…