New Jersey’s Most Dangerous Towns for Young Drivers, Ranked by the Numbers

New Jersey's young drivers actually have a pretty solid reputation. WalletHub keeps ranking the state near the top nationally for teen driving safety. But "safest state overall" doesn't mean every town looks the same, and if you're a parent about to hand your kid the keys, the numbers matter a lot more than a statewide grade.

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We dug into the New Jersey Attorney General's Division of Highway Traffic Safety "Young Drivers" report, the most detailed town-by-town breakdown the state has published. It tracks every police reported crash involving a driver age 16 to 20 across all 557 NJ municipalities, from 2013 through 2017. That's the most recent year-by-town data available. No newer municipal edition has been released since.

How We Ranked These Towns

Raw crash counts alone can be misleading. Bigger towns naturally rack up more crashes just because more people live there and more cars are on the road. So we ranked these towns by crashes per 1,000 residents, using 2020 Census population, to get a fairer read on relative risk instead of just city size.

READ MORE: NJ's 25 Safest Towns Just Got Ranked, See Where Yours Lands

A Quick Word on Number One

One town technically blows away the per capita list. That's almost certainly a quirk of the math and not a real danger signal. It has under 27,000 residents but hosts some of the busiest retail corridors in the state, so a lot of the crashes counted there probably involve drivers who don't even live in town. Take that particular ranking with a grain of salt.

Here's the full list, from the numbers on down.