Moving Words – Driving Time
Timothy Brady
A study by Forbes Advisor deciphered the National Highway safety data from 2016 to 2020 with the specific intent of revealing highway crash fatalities for each state for each hour, day, and month. Interestingly, it was determined in the study the most dangerous hour to drive in the United States is between 6pm to 7pm with 8,563 highway crash deaths occurring during that hour. Continuing with the hour data, the second most dangerous hour to be driving is 8pm to 9pm (8,387 deaths), with 9pm to 10pm coming in a close third (8,241).
As far as the most dangerous day of the week, it’s Saturday, with 25,907 combined fatalities for the same period, 2016 – 2020. Sadly, weekends turned out to be an extremely dangerous time to drive, as the four years analyzed revealed Friday is the second most dangerous day with 23,147 deaths and Sunday with 23,038 deaths.
October is the month with the highest overall road crash fatalities with13,566. July is second with13,482, followed by September with13,404.
So what about the most dangerous states? The most dangerous time in 13 states was 5pm to 6pm. And those states were all over the map with New York, Massachusetts, Georgia and Nevada included. In most of the states the highest number of crash deaths occurred between 3pm and 10pm. Exceptions were South Dakota with the deadliest hour being 11am and 12 pm (noon); Maryland, with the highest fatality hour 11pm to 12 am (midnight), and in Rhode Island, the hour with the highest road crash deaths was 12am (midnight) to 1am.
Saturday was the most dangerous day in 40 states. Six states: Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Oklahoma, and Mississippi had Friday as the day with the most fatalities. Sunday was the most dangerous in Nebraska and New Jersey. The two outlier states were West Virginia – Thursday, and Rhode Island – Monday.
July has the highest road crash fatalities in 14 states, while October and September were the deadliest in 12 states. March holds the fatality record for Florida, and April for Arizona. Interestingly, November is the deadliest month for California and Hawaii.
In my multi-million-mile truck driving career with zero accidents and zero tickets, I concur with this data. In the majority of the road crash fatality statistics, the most dangerous hours were during rush hour traffic. I personally was determined not to be driving in either morning or evening rush hour traffic with a 75-foot, 30-to-40-ton vehicle. Stopping in close quarters is a challenge under normal traffic flow, but add the stop-and-go of rush hour and the likelihood that one direction of traffic would be driving directly into the rising or setting sun, it was nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen.
It should be noted this study wasn’t directed towards trucking; and as far as I could find in looking over the National Highway Safety Administration data, there wasn’t any separating out of truck data. But as any safety conscious van operator would tell us, picking your driving time is crucial to being accident-free while operating a commercial vehicle.
The nickname ‘bumper-to-bumper-bash’ unfortunately is often painfully true.
