PhillyInc: Philadelphia near the bottom in Allstate's rankings of safe-driver cities

   Here's why Philadelphia, and not Fort Collins, Colo., is the setting for not one, but two cable-television series that revolve around driving in the city:

   Accidents do happen here.

   Allstate Insurance Co. on Thursday released its latest annual list of cities with the safest drivers. Fort Collins was deemed the safest. Philadelphia, which wasn't the worst, landed in the bottom 10 of the 193 cities in the rankings.

   However, keep in mind that the Northbrook, Ill., company, which controls 11 percent of the nation's auto-insurance market, reached this conclusion by examining only its own claims data. It's possible State Farm, Progressive, or Geico could do the same analysis and have different cities at the top or bottom of its list.

   Allstate ranked cities based on the likelihood a driver would experience a vehicle crash compared with the national average.

   The insurer said a driver in Philadelphia is 53.5 percent more likely to be involved in an accident than the national average. The average number of years between accidents for Philadelphians is 6.5, compared with 10 years nationally.

   In last place was Washington, D.C., where a driver is 95.5 percent more likely to get into a car crash than the national average. That's an accident every 5.1 years.

   Far from celebrating fender-benders, Allstate wants the focus to be on safe driving and minimizing accidents. That's why it calls the report Allstate America's Best Drivers Report.

   So it crowned Fort Collins as the city with America's safest drivers, where the average number of years between accidents is 14.5 years - not a growth market for tow-truck drivers.

Into the cloud

   If 3Par Inc. is the only company you can name right now that's involved in the cloud-computing business, let me offer up a local player: Alteva L.L.C.

   It's a privately held firm started in 2003 by William Bumbernick that provides telecommunications services to businesses over the Internet.

   What's interesting is that Alteva isn't housed in some suburban office park, but in the Bourse Building on Independence Mall - an area of the city better known for the American Revolution than for technological evolution.

   The firm has 30 employees here and a small presence in Washington, Bumbernick said.