Students, doctors, and lawyers are the most accident prone in White Plains?

Ken Valenti
The Journal News

The next time you get into an accident, there's a good chance that a doctor or a lawyer will be on hand. Maybe both.

In fact, they may be in the other car.

Those two professions topped a recently compiled list of how frequently people in various occupations crash. Doctors came in first, lawyers second. Architects were third.

None of them, however, compares with students, the category with far more frequent accidents than anyone else.

All this is according to Quality Planning Corp., a California firm that verifies information for insurance companies. In the course of its work, the company compiles loads of information about accidents and the people involved in them. With all that data flowing through, the company occasionally issues reports on subjects the investigators find interesting, said Tim Cox, a company spokesman.

"Quality Planning has a lot of information that it can look at across different insurance companies and all across the country," he said.

Other professions that see a lot of accidents are real estate agents.

That students crash most often was not a surprise. Cox said lack of experience would account for that. For every 1,000 students, there are about 152 accidents and 87 speeding tickets per year, the report showed. That compares with 109 accidents and 44 speeding tickets for doctors. For lawyers: 106 accidents and 37 speeding tickets.

Quality Planning officials had no theory on why those jobs topped the list. So I put the list to Robert Sinclair, spokesman for AAA New York, who saw one category that seems to sum up most of them: Tired drivers.

"These are professions that put in lots and lots of hours," Sinclair said. "Often fatigued driving can be a greater impingement on skills and abilities than alcohol."

The remaining professions on the top 10 list, presented on www.insure.com: enlisted military personnel, social workers, manual laborers, analysts, engineers and consultants.

Notably, the list does not include championship golfers. (I had to ask in the aftermath of that whole Tiger Woods incident.) Indeed, athletes are not listed at all. Cox said it might be that there were not enough accidents to get a good sample for a ratio of accidents per 1,000 pros.

(I couldn't help notice that the list also does not include "newspaper reporter," but maybe there simply aren't 1,000 of us left.)

Cox sent me the entire list compiled by Quality Planning, which includes 40 categories — student plus 39 occupations. The safest on the list were farmers. Perhaps they count the ones driving tractors about 5 mph. (Then again, maybe not, since farmers ranked seventh in the number of speeding tickets they received.) Maybe the low accident number has to do with the wide-open nature of farmland.

The next safest were firefighters, with 67 annual accidents per 1,000, and pilots, with 75. (They ranked 29th and 33rd, respectively, in the number of speeding tickets they received, the report showed.) It also made a lot of sense to Sinclair that those two professions would fare better than many others in the crash category.

"These are two professions for whom safety is at the core of what they do," he said.

The next three safest came in at a tie — homemakers, politicians and members of the clergy — each with 76 accidents annually per 1,000.

The same company came out about a year ago with a list of accidents based on the vehicle driven. If you're thinking those hot rodders in sports cars are the worst, think again.

Apparently the driver of a Jaguar has a much more delicate touch — afraid of seeing the paint scratched, perhaps — than a Hummer.

Lever & Stolzenberg, LLP is located in White Plains, New York and serves clients throughout the state, including New York City's five boroughs (The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island) as well as Westchester County, Rockland County and Long Island. 

Additional Cities: Yonkers, Port Chester, Scarsdale, New Rochelle, Peekskill, Rye, Mount Kisco, Bedford, Eastchester, Mount Vernon, Mount Pleasant, Pelham, Ossining, Greenburgh, New City, Spring Valley, Pearl River.

Additional Counties: Orange County, Dutchess County, Putnam County.