States with most Auto Fatalities

These questions always have multiple if not dozens of factors in play.
Except NM, a state I know. Our problem is alcohol.

It is remarkable though how often the South as a region is a leader in things bad.

 

I'm surprised there's anyone left in North Dakota, looking at that.

 

Looks like Lake Michigan has nearly 0 deaths per 100,000. WTH is with ND?

 

It could be a population thing. There was one year that Liechtenstein has the highest murder rate in Europe because one person got killed. So maybe in the year in question, there were one or two terrible accidents in ND, and with such a small population, that was enough to skew the figures.

Or maybe they're terrible drivers.

 

if there isn't a seatbelt law, might you have a lot more injuries and less fatalities?

 

...I thought stop signs were optional in MA, but looks like they are doing great!
Good choice as location for the next Prius convention.

 

There was a post on this forum recently about annual inspections in the US and which States do and don't have them. I'm sure I recall that States that didn't have them are the ones with darker shades on the above map.

Can anyone be bothered to post both maps side by side?


(UK 3.5 deaths per 100,000 population & Australia 5.2. One has a high population density, the other doesn't. Why is the US coming up at 11.6?) List of countries by traffic-related death rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

That is an extremely misleading chart ?
SO lets try this as an example. what is the population of California . at current it is 39.54 million or 395400000.
So lets look at Oklahoma . 3.931 or 39310000 . in actuality there is 1 /10 the population of California in Ok.
Now lets look at 2 other items of interest. The people in Oaklahoma are more likely to be traveling in a group to church or school. While in California they are more likely to travel as a single occupent on their way to and from work. So the actual number of car accident maybe total the same per 100,000 between both states. But the number or people in the car means that the one has many more fatalities because they are traveling as a group.

 

The study was updated in 2018: http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2018-3.pdf

Click on header to sort column.

	State	Rate per 100k
1	District of Columbia	3.4
2	Alabama	17.5
3	Alaska	8.8
4	Arizona	13.1
5	Arkansas	17.8
6	California	8.1
7	Colorado	10.0
8	Connecticut	7.4
9	Delaware	13.3
10	Florida	14.5
11	Georgia	14.0
12	Hawaii	6.6
13	Idaho	13.1
14	Illinois	7.8
15	Indiana	12.4
16	Iowa	10.2
17	Kansas	12.2
18	Kentucky	17.2
19	Louisiana	15.5
20	Maine	11.7
21	Maryland	8.5
22	Massachusetts	4.5
23	Michigan	9.7
24	Minnesota	7.5
25	Mississippi	22.6
26	Missouri	14.3
27	Montana	21.7
28	Nebraska	13.0
29	Nevada	11.2
30	New Hampshire	8.6
31	New Jersey	6.3
32	New Mexico	14.3
33	New York	5.7
34	North Carolina	13.7
35	North Dakota	17.3
36	Ohio	9.6
37	Oklahoma	16.4
38	Oregon	11.1
39	Pennsylvania	9.4
40	Rhode Island	4.3
41	South Carolina	20.0
42	South Dakota	15.5
43	Tennessee	14.5
44	Texas	12.8
45	Utah	9.2
46	Vermont	9.1
47	Virginia	9.0
48	Washington	7.9
49	West Virginia	14.5
50	Wisconsin	9.8
51	Wyoming	24.7

	State	Rate
1	U.S.A.	10.9

Bob Wilson

 

A portion of it would the 'drive-through' bias, from a lot of non-local traffic passing through. For the same reason, in other traffic safety reports ranking all the counties in the nation, the worst-rated are uniformly low-density rural counties with major Interstate Highways running through them. When figuring per-capita motor vehicle fatalities, those highways carry a lot of vehicle-miles from nonresidents, contributing very significantly to the crashes in the numerator, but nothing to the small population in the denominator.

And these highways carry a higher fraction of heavy truck traffic, which may not be significant in single vehicle crashes, but are extra deadly when they tangle with cars.

Wyoming 'loses' in the latest update. It is also a low-population drive-through state.

Re-casting these figures and maps on a per-vehicle-mile-traveled (VMT) basis would help identity and separate out this drive-through bias, so that we could better see the actual road safety issues. But VMT figures are harder to obtain.

 

I'm a bit challenged on US States, cobbled this:

 

Mississippi has some of the worst education stats of the nation. Usually, I think "no trained employees" when I see our numbers.

Today it is clear our education is so bad they are not trained to drive.

What do you call a car in Mississippi with it's turn signal on? Out of state.

 

.

 

..

 

Somehow, I suspect that even before this exercise, you (Note to readers here who haven't noticed his Location: he is a Canadian) still would have done better than the average American tasked with identifying Canadian provinces on a map.

... and even done well enough competing against today's American high school students in identifying the U.S. states on this map.

 

Only the ones with white borders.