Boca Raton, FL / ACCESSWIRE / January 1, 2017 / You probably know this already but a study that was published earlier this year made it official, Florida has the most dangerous drivers in the country. Personal finance tech company SmartAsset looked at driver-related information and determined that the state is plagued by the most road perils. They came to the conclusion that Florida is filled with terrible drivers, reports the South Florida Business Journal. Boca car accident lawyer Joe Osborne is not surprised.
According to SmartAsset, to come up with this finding they looked at number of drivers, DUI arrests, traffic related deaths per thousand drivers and Google trends in speeding ticket searches and the percentage of people who have auto insurance. Those in Florida who do web searches on “speeding tickets” and “traffic tickets” most often:
Have low rates of insurance (23.8% of drivers)
Have more traffic-related deaths than nine of the top 25 states
Based on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Florida has 4.45 “driving under the influence” arrests per 1,000 drivers (compared to Vermont at 50.86 DUI arrests per 1,000 drivers while Delaware has 0.29 arrests per 1,000 drivers).
Four out of the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) ten states in the study are in the southeast.
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Florida
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Mississippi
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Oklahoma
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New Jersey
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Delaware
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Alabama
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Vermont
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Tennessee
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Texas
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Nevada
Of the 25 states ranked, Iowa was the state with the safest drivers.
NHTSA has these frightening Florida traffic facts for 2015, reports car accident attorney Osborne:
There were 2,939 traffic fatalities, the most since 2008, which comes to about eight traffic deaths per day.
797 of those fatalities were alcohol related.
There were 616 motorcyclist fatalities, 628 pedestrians and 150 cyclists killed that year.
Florida’s vehicle fatality rate (number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled) was 14.5, much higher than the national average (10.92) and far greater than the state with the lowest rate (3.42).
Palm Beach County is ranked as the fourth highest in traffic fatalities with 187 (Miami-Dade County was the highest with 340) which is a 44% increase from 2014.
Traffic accidents have many causes. According to NHTSA, based on information from 2005 to 2007, mistakes by drivers cause of 94% of crashes, problems with the vehicle 2% of the time and the environment another 2%. Those driver mistakes include:
Recognition error (driver’s inattention, distractions and inadequate surveillance) was the most common (41%).
Decision error (driving too fast for conditions or for a curve, false assumption of others’ actions, illegal maneuvers and misjudgment of the gap with another vehicle or others’ speed) caused about 33% percent of accidents.