Are you in good hands? Maybe not if they belong to an Anchorage driver.

Residents are crashing more often than in years past, according to a report released this week by Allstate Insurance Co.

The fourth annual "Allstate America's Best Drivers Report" puts Anchorage 132nd out of the 200 largest cities nationwide that were analyzed to determine the likelihood of drivers being involved in an accident. Anchorage ranked 99th last year.

The safest community gets the No. 1 spot in the analysis, which is based on Allstate policy-holders' claims data.

Allstate held 17 percent of the market in Alaska with 66,000 policies statewide at the end of 2007, said Ryan Priest, a Washington-based spokesman for the company. The purpose of the report is to increase driver awareness and hopefully make the roads safer, he said.

"This doesn't take a look at the reasons people get into collisions; it just looks at the trends," Priest said. "It's just kind of a snapshot of driving patterns around the country without pointing the finger."

According to the report, Anchorage drivers are 14.7 percent more likely to be involved in a crash than the national average for U.S. cities -- double the likelihood from 2007.

Anchorage drivers crash their vehicles every 8.7 years on average, down from 9.3 years in the previous report. The national average is one crash every 10 years.

"Some people are obviously going to experience a lot more crashes in that time than others," said Anchorage police Sgt. Matt Bloodgood, supervisor of the traffic unit. "Obviously, we could do better. But it could be worse."

Anchorage police do not compile similar statistics, so it's hard to tell if Allstate's numbers represent drivers at large, he said.

"One of the things I look at is how many people are dying on the streets in Anchorage," Bloodgood said. "We are less than half where we were at this time last year. I can only hope the numbers stay that low."

There were 14 traffic deaths by this time last year, and, so far, only five in Anchorage this year, according to police.

While Anchorage may have had a dismal drop on Allstate's national chart, it came in eighth in the company's Northwestern region, which includes cities in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The finish was ahead of Seattle and Tacoma, Wash. Boise, Idaho, was the safest in the region and came in 15th nationally.

The safest drivers in the country, according to Allstate's report, are in Sioux Falls, S.D., where the drivers are involved in crashes on average every 14.6 years and are 32 percent less likely to wreck than the national average. The city of about 150,000 residents has held the top spot for three years.

The report is based on claims data collected by Allstate, an insurance company that represents about 12 percent of auto policies across the country. Data was taken from a two-year period spanning 2005 and 2006, Priest said.

Fraser Engerman, a spokesman for State Farm Insurance Co., the largest insurer in the country, said his company has not compiled similar data in recent years, although anecdotally, the frequency of accidents has been in decline.

"We haven't put out any formal data like Allstate has, but I think we're seeing that with the high gas prices, people are driving less, and that could translate into fewer accidents," he said. "But I think it's too soon to say if there's a trend."

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.