The way we live today, a car is an undeniable necessity. And yet it remains one of the most hazardous endeavors of our daily lives―to take the car out and drive from point A to point B without getting mowed down in the middle. America has a bad statistical history of car accidents. Our roads, no matter what we would like to believe, are not as safe as they should be and drunk driving is a huge problem in the country. The last two decades have shown a decline in numbers, but it's certainly not enough.
A Game of Numbers
About 25% of all crashes lead to an injury and about 1% leads to death. The percentages may seem low but when converted to absolute numbers they tell a scary story. The National Safety Council estimates that last year, about 35,200 people died in car accidents in the country.
As many as 3.8 million crashes required urgent medical attention. NSC officials say that most of the crashes can be blamed solely on human error. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the other hand says that there is one motor vehicle accident roughly every ten seconds in America. An average driver in the US gets into an accident once very ten years.
North-easterners beware!
Despite significant advances in safety and technological innovations, car accidents remain the leading cause of death among young adults in the country, according to statistics from accident attorneys in the US. Anecdotally, it has also been shown that male teenage drivers are more dangerous than their counterparts on the road. As if this all this was not frightening enough, accident attorneys also say that the crowded traffic-choked northeastern cities in the country are the ones where car accidents are most likely to occur.
Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Newark, Hartford, New Haven and Springfield and Worcester, Mass. dwellers are cities at high risk of car-accidents. San Francisco, despite its lovely weather and the bohemian loving culture is another city that tops the list for being hazardous for its drivers. The dense population and the traffic in the city is to be blamed for that.
Cities with fewer accidents per capita include Fort Collins, Colo., Brownsville, Texas, and Boise, Idaho. If you live here, your chances of making it past your prime in one piece increase significantly!
Weather―Death in Disguise
When accident attorneys were asked about the main reason for car accidents, they said that distracted driving was the primary cause of accidents on the road and the bulk of their cases revolved around that. Research says that about 25-50% of all motor vehicle crashes in the US have driver distraction as their root cause. Other reasons include driver fatigue, drunken driving, speeding, aggressive driving, and sometimes, the weather. It might sound shocking but driving is the deadliest weather hazard in the country and despite all the coverage about tornadoes, storms, and floods, it still remains so.
Winter is here already and frost and ice are not really conducive to driving. So if you are reading this, remember to double check your car before you take it out and be extremely careful when on the road.
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