While many places claim to have the worst drivers, one that keeps popping up consistently is Boston, Massachusetts. Allstate’s 2025 America’s Best Drivers Report ranks drivers in 200 U.S. cities from best to worst. Boston ranks dead last at number 200, showing no improvement whatsoever since Allstate’s previous study in 2015.
I grew up and lived in the Boston area for most of my life, and I can personally attest to the validity of this result. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. For the two years I worked in Boston, I chose to take the notoriously unreliable public transit rather than fight Boston drivers and traffic, only to be unable to find a parking space when I got there. Indeed, the entire area between Boston, Worcester (197 on the list), and Providence, Rhode Island (192) creates a triangle of terror for anyone who wants to get anywhere in one piece.
Why are Boston drivers so bad?
Certainly, part of the blame goes to the drivers themselves. They don’t call them “Massholes” for nothing, with a “me first” attitude and a general lack of awareness, or even caring, about what’s going on around them. Having “earned” (I used that term quite loosely) my driver’s license in Massachusetts, I know how little car control or even basic driving skill was involved in the process. Just a 15-minute drive around the block, pulling over to the side of the road, and parallel parking was all it took to set me loose.
The confusing road system doesn’t exactly help, either. Boston also has some of the worst traffic and worst roads. It’s an urban legend that Boston’s tangled, twisted road network is simply the paved-over cow paths of colonial times. Regardless of bovine civil engineers, the city grew far bigger than its original infrastructure could support. There was also little room to expand that infrastructure, which led to boondoggles like the Big Dig. The highest concentration of Dunkin Donuts locations in New England doesn’t help, either.
That doesn’t leave drivers off the hook, though. While Storrow Drive is a narrow, meandering parkway alongside the Charles River that strictly prohibits trucks and buses, they always seem to find their way onto it anyway. Then they promptly stuff themselves under the low bridges in a phenomenon known as “Storrowing,” particularly during college moving season. Not that any self-respecting Bostonian would bother reading the warning signs.
