Who’s the better driver: soccer mom or lawyer?

By Liz Pulliam Weston

Who's less likely to get in an accident -- a careful, methodical engineer or a harried soccer mom with a van full of screaming children?

Your insurance company probably would say the engineer.

That same company may even back it up with a discount on the premiums for people in that profession.

If research by a California data-crunching firm is correct, however, the lower-risk driver may actually be the homemaker.

A review of more than 1 million accident, speeding and moving-violation records across the country is challenging some insurers' long-held beliefs about which jobs are likely to indicate high-risk drivers.

San Francisco-based Quality Planning Corp., an insurance research firm, matched Department of Motor Vehicle records with its own database of 14 million auto insurance policies to match incidents, drivers and occupations.

Just take a look at this first list.

It is ranked 40 occupations by the number of accidents per 1,000 insured drivers in the 12-month period studied:

Who gets in the most accidents
Top 5 occupations	Accident rate*	Bottom 5 occupations	Accident rate
1. Student	152	36. Homemaker	76
2. Medical doctor	109	37. Politician	76
3. Attorney	106	38. Pilot	75
4. Architect	105	39. Firefighter	67
5. Real estate agent	102	40. Farmer	43

*Average for all occupations was 89. Source: Quality Planning Corp.

That students are by far the most accident-prone shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, said statistician Daniel Finnegan, Quality Planning's CEO. Their lack of driving experience and underestimation of their own mortality typically make them poorer-than-average drivers.

Or, to use language any actuary would love: "Youthful operators are highly predictive of losses," Finnegan said.

You also can understand real estate agents being on the list, given the 30,000 to 40,000 miles a year they drive on average. More miles mean more opportunities to crunch or be crunched.

Too confident -- or arrogant?

But many insurance executives, Finnegan said, assume highly educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and architects are less likely to be risky drivers -- exactly the opposite of what the review found. (Engineers, by the way, ranked 10th among the 40 professions analyzed, with a higher-than-average accident rate of 94 per 1,000 professionals.)

Finnegan can't say exactly why these professions rose to the top of the smash-up pile, but he has some theories.

"Anything we say is speculative," Finnegan said, "but these tend to be highly educated professionals . . . who are used to having the world pay attention to them."

In other words, the very traits that may help doctors, lawyers and architects in their professions -- call it confidence, or self-assurance, or downright arrogance -- make them riskier on the road.

There could be other explanations as well, such as huge workloads leading to fatigue or excessive cell phone use on the road.

Interestingly, doctors and lawyers fell to the middle of the pack when Finnegan looked at speeding tickets and moving violations. Architects, however, remained at the top of all three:

Occupations that get the speeding tickets -- and those that don't
Top 5 occupations	Ticket rate*	Bottom 5 occupations	Ticket rate
1. Student	88	36. Teacher/professor	30
2. Enlisted military	78	37. Secretary/clerical	27
3. Manual laborer	78	38. Law enforcement	39
4. Politician	76	39. Librarian	24
5. Architect	72	40. Homemaker	21

*Average for all occupations was 45. Note: Speeding tickets is a subset of moving violations. Source: Quality Planning Corp.

And politicians, who ranked near the bottom for accidents, moved up to the top for citations:

Occupations that get the most moving-violation citations
Top 5 occupations	Citation rate*	Bottom 5 occupations	Citation rate
1. Student	121	36. Firefighter	39
2. Manual laborer	112	37. Secretary/clerical	38
3. Architect	106	38. Librarian	33
4. Enlisted military	99	39. Law enforcement	32
5. Politician	97	40. Homemaker	31

*Average for all occupations was 63. Source: Quality Planning Corp.

Homemakers, teachers, librarians and secretaries ranked near the bottom of all three lists. So, too, did law enforcement personnel. Cynics may argue that cops are giving each other "professional courtesies" -- not writing up violations, for example. But it just might be, given their training and the number of humans they see made into road pizza, that cops are more careful than the rest of us.

Are insurance companies out of touch?

So are insurance companies getting it all wrong? Not many insurers give breaks to police officers and homemakers, but discounts for engineers or military personnel aren't uncommon.

Here are a couple of possible explanations:

Every insurer is different. Finnegan looked at a large pool of drivers, but insurers base their rates mostly on their own experience with a given group of people.

Based on Finnegan's figures, for example, giving discounts to military folks would seem like a bad move. Enlisted personnel ranked seventh in accidents, second in speeding tickets and fourth in moving violations. Officers did somewhat better, but still had higher-than-average rates: 14th in accidents, 15th in speeding violations and 17th in moving violations. Yet USAA successfully specializes in covering military families and consistently offers some of the lowest rates around.

Farmers Insurance, one of the nation's largest auto insurers, is another company that offers discounts -- to doctors and engineers as well as teachers, scientists, firefighters and cops. The company has found all those professionals to have lower losses than the average driver, said spokeswoman Mary Flynn.

The data don't reflect severity. A fender-bender costs an insurance company a lot less than a 15-car fatal pileup. It's entirely possible that professionals getting the discounts still have lower losses in dollar terms than occupations that don't get a break.

Many insurers don't take professions into account. The country's largest insurer, State Farm, doesn't offer breaks for any particular profession. The breaks that are offered at other insurers tend to be small. What you pay for insurance depends mostly on your driving record and experience, where you live, how many miles you drive and, increasingly, on your history of paying bills. (For more, see my column "How bad credit costs you with insurers.")

That's not to say insurers might not use these numbers, or figures like them, to start differentiating more by profession in the future. Allstate, for example, is considering offering discounts to certain unnamed professions, said spokeswoman Lisa Wannamaker, perhaps as early as next year.

Finnegan warned, though, that rating by occupation is tough for insurers to do successfully. Many people might be less than truthful about what they do to get a discount -- or avoid paying extra.

His research has shown him that many real estate agents fudge the number of miles they drive. To avoid detection, they lie about what they do, Finnegan said.

"A significant number don't tell their insurers their jobs," he said.

So, how do all these occupations stack up? This table shows the incidence and ranking of accidents, speeding tickets and other types of moving violations for all of the jobs studied:

How the occupations stack up*
Occupation	Accidents	Rank	Speeding violations	Rank	Moving violations	Rank
Student	152	1	87	1	121	1
Medical doctor	109	2	44	20	65	16
Attorney	106	3	37	26	56	24
Architect	105	4	72	5	106	3
Real estate broker	102	5	39	25	56	25
Unknown	101	6	43	21	63	18
Enlisted military	99	7	78	2	99	4
Social worker	98	8	33	32	47	30
Manual laborer	96	9	77	3	112	2
Analyst	95	10	40	22	60	21
Engineer	94	11	51	12	77	9
Consultant	94	12	50	14	68	14
Sales	93	13	51	11	73	13
Military officer	91	14	46	15	63	17
Nurse	90	15	31	36	43	34
School administrator	90	16	32	33	45	32
Skilled laborer	90	17	65	6	89	6
Librarian	90	18	24	40	33	39
Creative arts	90	19	37	28	53	27
Executive	89	20	51	13	73	11
Insurance agent	89	21	46	18	60	22
Banking/finance	89	22	46	17	62	19
Customer service	88	23	55	10	77	8
Manager	88	24	46	16	67	15
Medical support	87	25	35	31	50	28
Computer-related	87	26	55	9	82	7
Dentist	86	27	45	19	61	20
Pharmacist	85	28	31	35	44	33
Proprietor	84	29	37	27	54	26
Teacher/professor	84	30	30	37	43	35
Accountant	84	31	40	23	59	23
Law enforcement	79	32	24	39	32	40
Physical therapist	78	33	36	29	48	29
Veterinarian	78	34	39	24	45	31
Clerical/secretary	77	35	27	38	38	38
Clergyman	76	36	58	8	73	12
Homemaker	76	37	21	41	31	41
Politician	76	38	76	4	97	5
Pilot	75	39	31	34	41	36
Firefighter	67	40	35	30	39	37
Farmer	43	41	60	7	73	10
Average	89		45		63

*Table includes 'Unknown,' making the total number of entries 41. Source: Quality Planning Corp.

Liz Pulliam Weston's column appears every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions in the Your Money message board.