It's official: D.C. has the worst traffic in the country
Why it matters: You're not imagining it. It's bad out there.
Driving the news: D.C. dethroned LA for its famous congestion, topping the list of America's 50 most populous cities with the worst congestion.
🚗 By the numbers:
Average daily commute: Over 33 minutes (longest in the U.S.)
Average length of weekday congestion: 6 hours, 35 minutes.
😱 That's the equivalent of 71 days spent in traffic per year.
Between the lines: The timing coincides with back-to-office orders for federal government employees, and many private sector organizations following suit.
Threat level: Low for fatal car crashes. Perhaps a silver lining of all the gridlock: D.C. ranks in the bottom 10, with less than 6 fatal crashes per 100,000 people, according to Consumer Affairs.
Yes, but: DMV drivers are still pretty risky.
D.C. and Baltimore drivers have some of the shortest gaps on average between reported collisions among motorists from the 200 biggest U.S. cities, per Allstate claims data.
The big picture: Allstate determined risk by analyzing how many years drivers go without a reported collision for its 2025 America's Best Drivers Report.
The nationwide average is over 10 years. D.C. drivers clock a collision nearly every four years, while Baltimore runs just over four.
Alexandria, Virginia, is pretty risky, too — an average six years between collisions.
How it works: Allstate's report, which defines collisions as incidents resulting in property or collision damage claims, is based on 2022-2023 claims data.
That means minor fender benders that go unreported — as common in city driving as potholes and work zones — aren't captured here.
The intrigue: D.C. recently passed a new set of road rules designed to deter and penalize dangerous drivers, levying lawsuits and heavy fines — including on out-of-state offenders — who've racked up violations.
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Bike and bus lanes, roundabouts, and speed cameras all can keep vehicles from going at the speed of free-flowing traffic — and all these measures are implemented in parts of the D.C. area. Every three years, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a federally mandated regional planning group, does an in-depth survey of local commute times. It looks at commute length and time, where people are commuting from and to, and how they commute. The most recent data collection period just ended, and the report should be out late this year or early next year. Several hundred thousand surveys were issued, and about 8,000 were returned. The group's last report, released in 2022, reflected the pandemic shifts to remote work and more car trips taken alone. The commuting times found in that survey are generally higher than the census data — 37 minutes each way, which was a drop from 43 minutes in its 2019 survey. A key difference is that the Census Bureau considers a much larger and more rural area as part of the D.C. region, stretching out to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. Anecdotally, Daniel Sheehan of the council said that it is seeing far more interest in its Commuter Connections program, which helps people carpool or take transit to work. 'There are some people here in this region that started three or four years ago, and it's the first time they're regularly going to their office,' he said. What the council doesn't know and hopes to learn from the data is to what extent commuters are taking transit more often because of congestion.
