Texas drivers are the most reckless people on the road, according to new research.
A new analysis using six metrics, including accidents due to drunk and distracted driving, reveals where the worst drivers live in the US.
The Lone Star State topped the chart, scoring 100 out of 100, with the second-highest rate of drowsy drivers involved in fatal car collisions and also of fatal car accidents involving a driver on the wrong side of the road. or navigating incorrectly in a single one. passing street.
Louisiana ranked second, followed by Kansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.
Montana ranked ninth, but had the most drunk drivers per capita: 19.01 per 100,000 drivers.
Forbes Advisor analysts broke down the numbers and broke down America’s most dangerous and safest drivers by state.
According to Forbes, five of the top 10 states with the worst drivers are in the southern US, with several others in the desert Southwest.
Texas topped the list of states with the deadliest drivers, with Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and New Mexico just behind the Lone Star state.
Interestingly, many of the nation’s most densely populated states were found to have the safest drivers, including Rhode Island, California, and Massachusetts.
Washington, DC, the most densely populated area in the country, also had the safest drivers. Maybe it’s because of all the extremely slow, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Beltway.
Six metrics were incorporated into the Forbes analysis, each of which is a key category of dangerous driving behavior that was included in each state’s overall ranking.
First, it looked at the number of drunk drivers involved in a fatal car accident per 100,000 licensed drivers.
Forbes then compiled data on fatal car accidents involving a distracted driver per 100,000 licensed drivers. His definition of ‘distracted’ included drivers caught looking at their phone, talking or eating at the moment of impact.
They also looked at fatal drowsy driver crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers, which included not only drivers who were asleep, but also those who were fatigued, ill, or had passed out.
Drivers who did not follow the rules, with dire consequences, were divided into two groups.
Forbes analyzed fatal car crashes involving a driver going the wrong way down a one-way street or swerving onto the wrong side of the road as a group per 100,000 licensed drivers. The other group consisted of drivers who had ignored traffic signs, traffic signals, or traffic police per 100,000 licensed drivers:
All five of these crash types counted equally in Forbes’ analysis of fatal misdriving in each state, contributing 18 percent of a state’s total score.
And all the data for these categories comes from taking the average of these deaths from 2018 to 2020 as compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But a final category, which only accounted for 10 percent of each state’s total score, came from private data collected by mobility data and analytics company Arity: the number of recorded drivers looking at their cellphones per mile, in relative to the US average.
With all these means of being a bad driver, some states had lesser records.
Montana topped the rankings for drunk driving fatalities, with approximately 19.01 fatal accidents per 100,000 licensed drivers, despite ranking ninth in terms of overall bad drivers.
And New Mexico had the most fatal car accidents attributed to distracted drivers, with 9.54 accidents per 100,000 licensed drivers.
Ultimately, Texas ranked only worst in cumulative bad driving behavior.
The state ranked second in both sleepy and wrong-way traffic fatalities and third in drunk driving fatalities, but was not shown to be worst in any specific type of fatal misdriving.
Auto accident deaths have increased since 2019, according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the nonprofit National Safety Council.
Auto-related deaths increased 11 percent in 2021, with 46,980 deaths from a motor vehicle that year. But 2020 had already seen an 8.3 percent increase in car deaths, a jump up to 42,338 dead in 2020 from 39,107 dead in 2019.
Last year, deaths from car accidents held nearly steady at the alarmingly high levels of 2021, with 46,270 deaths recorded.
