When passing an auto accident on the side of the road, many people think to themselves, "What happened?"
The Auto Insurance Center, a car insurance news and information site, sought to answer that question. It compiled data on every fatal car accident in the US recorded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) Fatal Accident Reporting System from 2009 to 2013.
The data includes driver, passenger, and pedestrian fatalities.
The findings, shown below in map form, show what causes the most driving fatalities in every US state.
In a majority of states, failure to stay in your lane kills the most people. The second-most-common behavior was failing to yield the right-of-way, the leading cause in seven states.
To find out which states lead the country in each of these fatal driving behaviors, the Auto Insurance Center took the total number of crashes associated with each of these behaviors by state and divided that number by each state's population to arrive at a per capita metric for accurate comparison.
The Auto Insurance Center found all the states had particularly high rates of fatalities for a specific behavior and included large rural areas where thinly distributed law enforcement can't adequately enforce safe-driving laws.
Drunken Driving
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The Auto Insurance Center concluded that deaths from drunken driving are more prevalent in rural areas that lack public transportation. A potential drunken driver in North Dakota or Montana might not have the luxury of calling a cab or taking the subway compared with somebody in Washington, D.C., or New York.
The exception to this rule is Utah, where strict liquor laws and a large Mormon population result in fewer drunken drivers.
Speeding
Once again, rural areas prove more deadly for motorists when speeding. The Auto Insurance Center notes that in places like Montana and Wyoming rural roads can stretch on for miles with little traffic to slow drivers down, whereas urban areas often feature congested roadways.
Bad Weather
The following three maps compare two weather conditions to reveal which causes more deaths in each state.
To start, rain-slicked roads tend to kill more drivers than roads with snow in most states, but in the Midwest, snow tends to be more deadly.
Driving in the fog claims more lives than driving in the snow in the South and along the coasts, but the opposite is true in the Northeast and Midwest.
Finally, sleet is more deadly than crosswinds (wind blowing perpendicular to your direction of travel) in most of the country, but in the Southwest it's the opposite.
