Your auto policy is probably the most under-thought coverage you own.

Maryland's minimum is 30/60/15, meaning $30,000 per injured person, $60,000 per crash and $15,000 of property damage. It is a legal floor, not a plan, and the roads most Silver Spring drivers use every day are among the busiest in Montgomery County. MDOT SHA's 2024 counts put US 29 Colesville Road at 51,280 vehicles a day between Dale Drive and the Beltway and 63,410 north of it, MD 97 Georgia Avenue at 62,210 between 16th Street and the Beltway, and MD 193 University Boulevard at 41,980 at its Beltway interchange.

Volume alone is not the argument. Montgomery County's Vision Zero High Injury Network is, and Georgia Avenue carries more of it than any road in the county: ten segments, 7.27 miles, and 78 serious or fatal crashes across the 2015 to 2019 study window. The Montgomery Hills segment alone recorded 521 crashes and 18 serious or fatal ones. Wayne Avenue, Piney Branch Road and both arms of University Boulevard are on the same list. MDOT SHA has now funded $50.8 million to rebuild the Montgomery Hills stretch of MD 97, remove its reversible center lane and narrow the travel lanes to ten feet, with construction expected to begin in spring 2028.

Commuting here is unusual in a way that should change the policy. ACS 2024 five-year figures for the Silver Spring CDP show a mean one-way trip of 34.0 minutes, longer than Rockville, Bethesda, Potomac or Kensington, with 45.2 percent of workers driving alone, 13.8 percent riding transit and 27.3 percent working from home. And 16.5 percent of Silver Spring households have no vehicle at all, rising to 24.2 percent among renters. Local drivers here are carrying passengers with no auto policy of their own more often than anywhere else in the county we write.

So our normal starting point in Silver Spring is 250/500 liability with uninsured and underinsured motorist limits matched to it, Personal Injury Protection kept rather than waived, and an umbrella layered on top. On corridors where the county's own crash data says serious injuries concentrate, the distance between $30,000 and $250,000 per person is the distance between a claim that closes and a judgment that follows you.

Usually yes. Maryland requires carriers to offer PIP, but you can sign a waiver to remove it. The waiver saves a few dollars a month but eliminates first-dollar coverage for your medical bills and lost wages after an accident, regardless of fault.

If you have low-deductible health insurance and reliable income protection, the waiver might be fine. For most people, keeping PIP at $2,500–$5,000 is worth the small premium.

Adding a teenager will raise the premium. Whether it doubles depends almost entirely on whether the policy gets restructured, and most policies never do. Which car the new driver is assigned to, whether they are rated as an occasional operator, the good student and driver training credits, and whether the household takes a telematics program all move the number more than switching carriers does.

There is a local reason to take the conversation seriously beyond price. The roads a Silver Spring teenager learns on are the ones the county has already flagged. Georgia Avenue, Wayne Avenue, Piney Branch Road and both arms of University Boulevard all sit on Montgomery County's High Injury Network, and the county is actively lowering speed limits in response. MCDOT reduced limits on 33 roads between July 2025 and July 2026, on more than 250 neighborhood streets since 2021, and is working with the state to bring limits down on 18 High Injury Network corridors.

The July 2026 round named Silver Spring locations specifically, among them Indian Spring Drive at Caroline Avenue, Red Oak Drive at Columbia Boulevard, Saint Lawrence Drive at University Boulevard, and Woodland Drive at Spring Street. Those are residential streets feeding arterials, which is exactly the transition new drivers handle worst, and it is where a teenager here will do most of their first solo driving.

So our advice is consistent: raise the liability limits before you add the driver rather than after, confirm the teen has not been silently rated on the newest car in the household, keep uninsured and underinsured motorist limits matched to liability, and put an umbrella over the whole thing. A new teenage driver is the single most common reason a family's liability exposure quietly outgrows its liability limit.

Sometimes on the initial quote — and that's part of how captive carriers compete. The honest answer is that year-one pricing is not the same as year-three or year-five pricing, and captive carriers often price-cut at acquisition then increase rates over time.

The bigger difference, though, is the structure. A captive agent can only sell their company's auto product, even if it doesn't fit your situation. We work across Erie, Chubb, Cincinnati, and others — and recommend what actually fits, which is sometimes more expensive on day one and almost always less expensive over a five-year horizon.

You call us first — not the carrier's 1-800 number. We open the claim, brief the carrier's adjuster on your version of events, coordinate the repair shop (or salvage process for a total loss), and stay involved through resolution.

For serious claims — injury, total loss, third-party liability — we're the ones pushing for the right outcome. That's the part of the relationship that's hardest to demonstrate in advance and easiest to feel when something actually happens.

Maryland is an at-fault (tort) state: the driver who causes an accident is responsible for the resulting damages. Maryland also requires insurers to offer PIP for first-party medical coverage, and follows a strict contributory-negligence rule, which makes carrying strong liability and UM/UIM limits especially important.