One of the first things I noticed after moving to Washington was the sheer number of bad drivers. Lane markers are treated as mere suggestions. Use of turn signals is strictly optional. It doesn’t help that outside of the downtown area, the roads are a confusing jumble. That spells disaster in a city with a large transient population unfamiliar with the city’s nooks and crannies.
But that’s all anecdotal evidence. The hard data confirm that DC drivers are a sorry lot:
Washington had the most accident- prone drivers of any U.S. city for the third straight year, according to Allstate Corp., the biggest publicly traded U.S. auto insurer.
Washington’s drivers get in a collision every 5.1 years, meaning that they have a 96 percent higher chance of being in an accident than the average American driver…
The national average for the period between collisions has been about 10 years for the six years the company has conducted the study.
Read more here.
Inertia Wins! 