Photo by Mofo

According to an annual report by Allstate Insurance, D.C. drivers have no business criticizing the techniques of their fellow motorists in Maryland and Virginia. The insurance company’s eight annual “America’s Best Drivers Report” found that Washington drivers are far from that heady designation.

In fact, we’re the worst. And it’s the fifth year in a row that D.C. has wound up dead last in Allstate’s review of driving practices in 200 U.S. cities.

Drivers here crash their cars about once every 4.7 years, the Allstate survey found. That’s more than twice as often as the national average of drivers having accidents about once every decade.

But seriously, the entire Washington region fared poorly. Baltimore has the second-worst drivers, who experience collisions about once every 5.3 years. In Northern Virginia, Arlington and Alexandria both finished near the bottom of the rankings.

Part of our crappy driving might be attributable to a general feeling of self-importance, an Allstate spokesman told The Washington Examiner. People in D.C. are always on the go, and many of us would prefer not to brake for anyone or anything:

“It seems we’ve got some aggressive drivers and people who are impatient to get where they’re going, and those things seem to contribute to why there’s so many accidents,” said Adam Polak, a regional spokesman for Allstate.

Of course, what Allstate doesn’t admit is that despite the frequency of fender-benders on D.C. roadways, the insurance company did not determine how many of those accidents are being caused by drivers from Virginia and Maryland, both of which are home to notoriously bad drivers. Also, as Greater Greater Washington noted last year, there’s a lot of different things the rankings don’t measure and plenty of ways to reach the things it does.

And if you want to find the safest, most accident-free roads? Head to Sioux Falls, S.D., which topped the chart with drivers there reporting getting into accidents only once every 13.8 years. Fine, but I’ve been to Sioux Falls, and one of the reasons that it’s so safe there is that it’s South freakin’ Dakota, where there are more soybean fields than people. Good luck hitting anything more than unharvested vegetation.