July 4 officially is most dangerous day to drive in America

Toronto, ON - June 28, 2017 - A new study into America’s driving and fatality reports has revealed that July 4th is officially the most dangerous day to drive in the United States. The study, conducted by Geotab, a telematics and GPS vehicle tracking company, looked at the fatality and traffic data over a 10-year period to see how U.S. states differ when it comes to road safety. Using this data, they created an interactive infographic to show the most dangerous day to drive in each state, which you can view here.

Every year, over 30,000 people are killed on the roads in the United States, but recent findings have shown that specific days of the year, and even certain states, are more dangerous than others. Dates around national celebrations including Labor Day, Halloween and New Year’s Day, where alcohol consumption is at it’s highest, prove to have a significantly higher Fatal Crash Rate (FCR) than other days in the year.

The findings followed an analysis of road traffic, crash and fatality reports, including the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and Traffic Volume Trends most recently published in December 2016. Using this data, Geotab calculated a Fatal Crash Rate for each day and U.S. state, made up of the total number of fatal road accidents per billion miles driven by cars, trucks and motorcycles.

With an average of 119 deadly crashes over a 10-year period and a Fatal Crash Rate of 14.9, July 4th is the most dangerous day to drive in the United States. Unsurprisingly, July 4th also has the highest percentage of fatal crashes involving alcohol or incidents of driving under the influence, with an average of 47%.

On average, 28% of all road crashes are related to alcohol and driving under the influence, but that rate goes up significantly around national holidays. New Year’s day (41.6%) and Halloween (41%), which also feature in the top 10 most dangerous days to drive, also have a high percentage of alcohol related fatalities, each recording an FCR of 13.6.

"The future of connected vehicle data will enable Geotab to produce more services to help improve road safety and vehicle operating efficiency", says Colin Sutherland, Executive Vice President of Geotab. "Access to vehicle data is key to our capability to contribute our open platform that will further enhance research in connected vehicles".

Explore the full results on the interactive Most Dangerous Days to Drive infographic here: [https://www.geotab.com/the-most-dangerous-days-to-drive/]

About the data

To determine the most dangerous day to drive in each state, we calculated a Fatal Crash Rate that is based on the number of fatal crashes that occurred in the US between 2006 and 2015, taken from Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The raw number of crashes on each day was then weighted by the vehicle miles travelled in each state, obtained from Traffic Volume Trends. Fatal Crash Rate represents number of fatal road accidents per 1 billion vehicle-miles driven. Days with the highest Fatal Crash Rates were deemed the most dangerous.

Vehicle-miles travelled is a total number of miles travelled by any vehicle on any road in the United States. With the number of licensed drivers in the US at 218 million, it only takes each of them to travel 4.5 miles to reach 1 billion miles travelled overall. (Source)

Note that Fatal Crash Rate measures the number of motor vehicle crashes involving a fatality, rather than measuring the total number of fatalities. For instance; 13 million crashes occurred in the US in 2015 (latest official data), of which 1.7 million resulted in an injury with an estimated 2.4 million people injured. Of the 1.7 million crashes, 32,166 had fatalities claiming the lives of 35,092 people (Source).