Jeff Dooley, a Virginia native and current D.C. resident who runs The Washington Sun’s local and sports coverage, asked if we could confirm the D.C. region’s most enduring stereotype: Are Maryland drivers really the worst?
At first glance, the data seemed to confirm our suspicions.
A quick analysis of crash and license-plate data from D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department reveals something genuinely impressive: From 2019 to 2021, Maryland drivers were at fault in more two-car crashes in D.C. than drivers from anywhere else, including D.C. Those are the most recent years for which we have good numbers. The picture gets fuzzy in 2021 as the D.C. government appears to have tapped the brakes on releasing detailed license-plate data.
But is that an unfair assessment? Could it be that there are just more Maryland drivers on District roads?
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Of course there are. Of D.C. workers who commute by car, almost half (48%) drove in from Maryland between 2022 and 2024. Another 30% drove from Virginia, and only 21% were D.C. residents, according to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
How do we account for that? We tried some surprisingly simple math. We compared the share of accidents involving a driver with Maryland plates who’s at fault — meaning they were ticketed for an offense that could have caused an accident, such as running a red light, making an illegal U-turn or going the wrong way on a one-way street — to the share of Maryland drivers who were the unoffending party in a two-car accident.
When we did that, Maryland drivers didn’t look so bad. They’re only slightly more likely to be at fault in an accident as they are to be innocent victims, according to our analysis of about a decade of MPD data ending in 2021.
That still makes them worse than D.C. drivers, who are over 15% less likely to be at fault than to be the victim. But they both do far better than drivers from Virginia, who are over 20% more likely to be at fault. Drivers from outside the region fare even worse, but they’re rarer on the District’s roads and thus don’t feature as prominently in local stereotypes.
But before declaring D.C. drivers excellent, Maryland drivers exonerated and Virginia drivers the actual villains, we checked in with our colleagues. Right away, legendary District-knower Martin Austermuhle kindly reminded us that D.C. and Maryland drivers have been known to cross the river for cheaper Virginia plates, since the state has low fees and no residency requirement.
The dodge became less lucrative once Virginia began requiring insurance in 2024, but it appears to remain popular among folks looking to save a few bucks and maybe avoid Maryland inspections or fines. But Maryland is cracking down — beginning in October, a new law will fine residents with out-of-state plates.
D.C. has its own rules limiting outside plates, but D.C. licensed drivers remain far more likely to have out-of-state plates than drivers in any state in the country, according to our quick analysis of a decade of data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
Of all D.C. licensed drivers involved in fatal accidents, almost half (46%) were on out-of-state plates, compared with just 12% for the highest states. Drivers in deadly crashes probably differ meaningfully from the population at large, but it’s safe to assume D.C. remains unique by any measure.
Unfortunately, we can’t directly correct for out-of-state drivers. The MPD data released by the District Department of Transportation only tells us the state of the license plate, not the state the at-fault driver is licensed in. They did, however, release both license-state and plate-state data for more than 27,000 drivers involved in crashes that resulted in moving violations between 2016 and 2020.
And that data has one clear message: Don’t trust Virginia plates! More than a third (35%) of drivers cited by police with Virginia plates actually had licenses from other states. That’s about double the comparable number for Maryland drivers (17%).
So, what would D.C. data look like if we only measured “real” Virginia drivers? We can’t know. MPD doesn’t release enough driver’s license data. But we can guess based on better data from the District’s northern and eastern suburbs, courtesy of the Maryland State Police. It comes from different years — 2024 to 2026 — so it’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s the best we have.
In Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, drivers with Virginia plates look like absolute menaces, about 25% and 35% more likely to be at fault, respectively. But if you only look at drivers with Virginia licenses, the discrepancy effectively vanishes — they’re only slightly more likely to be the at-fault driver.
Why might D.C.-region drivers with Virginia plates be so much more reckless on the road? We’re guessing it’s partly explained by the clearest trend in the data. Young drivers — those under age 25 — are much, much more likely to be at fault in an accident in D.C., as will already be obvious to anyone who’s tried to insure a college student and/or knew us in our 20s.
In related news, those potemkin Virginians tend to be younger than drivers whose plates match their state. This makes sense, as cars with Virginia plates have long been cheaper to register and insure, and thus popular with the region’s impecunious youth. It also may explain their apparent recklessness.
In other words, the more we dug into the data, the more our gut impression shifted. We can’t say anything cohesive when faced with such balkanized numbers, but our feeling is that you might drive a bit more safely on your home roads, and maybe a bit more risk when you’re far from home, but those rules apply to everybody. Regardless of the state, drivers are roughly the same.
So it’s reasonable to drive defensively when you spot Virginia or out-of-state plates in D.C., but you can’t really blame actual Virginians. If you’re stereotyping anyone, it should probably be younger drivers, regardless of what state their plates come from.
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