America's City With The Worst DriversExploreAmanda ChatelWed, September 16, 2026 at 12:30 AM UTCAdd us on GoogleZocha_k/Getty ImagesEven 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementRead more: The 5 Most Dangerous Cities In America To Be Aware Of In 2025Boston's traffic and street layout is absolute chaosArtem Onoprienko/ShutterstockBoston 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."Although [Boston] features a grid in some neighborhoods like the Back Bay and South Boston, these grids tend to not be aligned with one another, resulting in a mish-mash of competing orientations," Geoff Boeing, then-postdoctoral researcher in urban planning at the University of California in Berkeley, told the Boston Globe in July 2018, adding that these grids aren't found everywhere, creating more confusion, while other Boston streets wind in random directions. You can think you're heading north, then one turn will have you heading in the opposite direction. "[I]t's hard to know where you're eventually really heading in the long run," explained Boeing.If that weren't enough, once those New England nor'easters drop a few feet of snow, no matter how beautiful Boston is in the winter, those streets become practically lethal. But because the MBTA, Boston's subway system, isn't the most reliable, driving seems more convenient — even if it's far more dangerous. In other words, Bostonians are thrown a lot of curve balls every time they get in a car to drive anywhere.Boston drivers almost might like living up to their reputationfast-stock/ShutterstockLike anything, there isn't just one reason why Boston drivers can't seem to get past 3.75 years before having a collision. Although the usual culprits and dangerous driving mistakes, like distractions (most notably texting), fatigue, and driving under the influence come into play, Bostonians are also a product of where they live. "People in Massachusetts didn't get termed 'Massholes' for no reason," lecturer on transportation policy at Boston University, Terry Regan, told the Boston Globe in July 2025. "They tend to follow closely; they tend to run through yellow lights."AdvertisementAdvertisementWhen Boston.com asked their readers in April 2023 to describe Boston drivers, true to form, the Bostonians were very, well, Boston in their answers, to say the least. While some felt Massachusetts drivers are some of the best in the country, and others felt that people who live in Boston are entitled, something that kept coming up in the responses was the justification for being aggressive."We are aggressive because we have to be. Bad roads, heavy traffic, city streets that have no patterns," one reader on Facebook said. "I think we are actually aggressively smart. I would also say, don't play chicken with us. If you aren't a born and bred Massachusetts driver, you don't have it in you to live up to your bluff and we don't bluff." Sounds like Boston will be keeping their crowns for the worst drivers in 2027 too — and sometimes consistency is a good thing.Ready to discover more hidden gems and expert travel tips? Subscribe to our free newsletter for access to the world's best-kept travel secrets. You can also add us as a preferred search source on Google.Read the original article on Explore.