This Is America’s Most Dangerous City For Driving

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is America’s Most Dangerous City For Driving

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, American motorists have decreased their amount of driving precipitously as they worked remotely instead of commuting and stayed at home instead of going out to restaurants, shows, and sporting events. Counterintuitively, however, that has not resulted in safer roads.

“Unfortunately, the pandemic and the resulting economic dislocations and stay-at-home orders have been accompanied by a sharp increase in risky driving and fatal crashes,” wrote the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in January, in ”An Open Letter to the Driving Public.”

Before 2020, driving was already risky enough. In 2019, road accidents killed more than 36,000 people in the U.S. and injured more than 2.7 million, according to NHTSA.

Preliminary data for 2020, the agency said, suggests a sharp increase in risky behavior behind the wheel and more fatal crashes. People were driving faster in select metropolitan areas, were driving while impaired by drugs or alcohol, and were not wearing seat belts. (In April of last year, double the usual number of people were thrown from their vehicles during crashes.)

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Some U.S. cities are more perilous than others. In addition to differences in driver behavior, this may be due to the fact that speed limits and other traffic safety laws vary from state to state, and the fact that road maintenance is better in some places than others.

This ranking of America’s most dangerous cities for drivers as of 2019 is based on information collated from both governmental and private sources by the RV rental company Outdoorsy.

Researchers from Outdoorsy, an RV rental company, analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, and Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report 2019. Outdoorsy created a composite index, combining relative likelihood of a collision, total motor vehicle fatalities, and share of fatal collisions involving a drunk driver. Only major American cities with data available from all three data sources were included, and in the event of a tie, the city with the longest period between collisions ranked better.

Dallas, Texas is the most dangerous city for driving. Here are some of the details:

> Avg time between collisions: 7.2 years
> Likelihood of collision compared to US avg: +46.5% — #28 out of 194 cities
> Motor vehicle fatalities per 100k: 14.3 — #21 out of 194 cities
> Population: 1,343,565

Click here to read These Are The Most Dangerous Cities For Driving

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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