Texas drivers are the most reckless people on the road, according to new research.
A new analysis using six metrics, including crashes from drunk and distracted drivers, reveals where the worst drivers live in the United States.
The Lone Star State leads the rankings, with a rating of 100 out of 100, with the second highest rate of drowsy drivers involved in fatal car collisions and also fatal car crashes involving a driver on the wrong side of the route or navigating incorrectly. path street.
Louisiana placed second, followed by Kansas, Oklahoma and Kentucky.
A new analysis using six metrics, including crashes from drunk and distracted drivers, reveals where the worst drivers live in the United States. The Lone Star State tops the charts, with a score of 100 out of 100, with the second highest rate of drowsy drivers involved in fatal car collisions and also fatal car crashes involving a driver on the wrong side of the route or navigating incorrectly. one way street
Montana came ninth, but had the highest number of drunk drivers per capita – 19.01 per 100,000 drivers.
analysts with Forbes Advisor crunched 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 United States, and several more are in the desert southwest.
Texas tops the list of states with the most lethally horrible drivers, with Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and New Mexico just behind the Lone Star State.
Oddly enough, many of the country’s most densely populated states have proven 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 due to the extremely slow, bumper-to-bumper traffic of the entire Beltway.
Six metrics fed into Forbes’ analysis of bad drivers across the United States – each a key category of unsafe driving behavior that they factored into each state’s total ranking.
First, the analysis looked at the number of drunk drivers involved in a fatal car crash per 100,000 licensed drivers.
Next, Forbes compiled data on fatal car crashes involving a distracted driver per 100,000 licensed drivers. Their definition of “distracted” included drivers caught looking at their phone, talking or eating at the time of impact.
They also looked at drowsy-driver fatalities for 100,000 licensed drivers, which included not only drivers who were sleeping, but also those who were tired, ill or had passed out.
Drivers who broke the rules, with disastrous consequences, were split into two groups.
Forbes analyzed fatal car crashes involving a driver who went the wrong way down a one-way street or veered to the wrong side of the road as a group per 100,000 licensed drivers. The other group consisted of drivers who ignored traffic signs, traffic lights or traffic police per 100,000 licensed drivers:
These five types of crashes counted equally in Forbes’ analysis of fatal misconduct in each state, contributing 18% to a state’s total score.
And all of the data for those categories comes from the average of those deaths from 2018 to 2020, as collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But a final category, which made up just 10% of each state’s total score, came from private data collected by mobility data and analytics firm Arity: the number of registered drivers looking at their cellphones per mile, compared to to the American average. .
With all of these ways to be a bad driver, some states held minor records.
Montana tops the rankings for impaired driving fatalities, with about 19.01 fatal crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers, despite ranking ninth in bad drivers overall.
And New Mexico had the highest number of fatal car crashes attributed to distracted drivers, with 9.54 crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers.
Ultimately, Texas was ranked only the worst in cumulative bad driving behavior.
The state ranked second in deaths from drowsy and wrong-way driving crashes and third in drunk driving deaths, but hasn’t been shown to be the worst in no specific type of fatal misconduct.
The number of deaths in car crashes has increased since 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the nonprofit National Safety Council.
Deaths involving automobiles rose 11% in 2021, with 46,980 motor vehicle deaths that year. But 2020 had already seen an 8.3% increase in automobile fatalities, a jump to 42,338 fatalities in 2020 from 39,107 fatalities in 2019.
Last year, car crash fatalities remained nearly flat at alarming 2021 levels, with 46,270 deaths recorded.
