Claim: New Year's is the day of the year on which the greatest number of people are killed in automobile accidents.
Origins: Many a motorist who has set out to drive somewhere on New Year's Day has departed to an emphatic chorus of "Be careful!" admonitions from relatives, friends, and acquaintances, the presumption being that New Year's is a particularly
dangerous day to be out on public roads. The combination of a holiday noted for alcoholic consumption among its revelers falling at a time of year when daylight hours are short and winter weather makes for less than ideal driving conditions is presumed to pose an especially high risk for motorists.
But is New Year's Day actually the most dangerous day for driving? While the general concept of "danger" is difficult to quantify, if we define it to mean "the day of the year that typically sees the greatest number of automobile accident-related deaths," New Year's Day is not the most dangerous day of the year.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) analyzed data from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for the seventeen-year span from 1986 to 2002 and calculated the average number of people who died in automobile crashes for every date of the year. The results showed that in number of fatalities, January 1 ranked lower than the days immediately preceding the Christmas and Fourth of July holidays, and not significantly higher than several days in early to mid-August:
DAYS WITH THE MOST CRASH DEATHS, 1986-2002
Total deaths
Avg. per day
July 4
2,743
161
July 3
2,534
149
December 23
2,470
145
August 3
2,413
142
January 1
2,411
142
August 6
2,387
140
August 4
2,365
139
August 12
2,359
139
July 2
2,340
138
September 2
2,336
137
(Caveat: This chart is based on absolute figures, not relative ones. A significant factor behind why days in July and August correspond to higher numbers of traffic fatalities is because July and August are the months in which total number of miles driven by motorists reaches its peak for the year, while January and February represent the opposite extreme.)
Not surprisingly, as the IIHS observed, alcohol plays a large part in the reason why holidays such as New Year's and the Fourth of July experience more automobile-related deaths:
Forty-one percent of the deaths on the 4th [of July] and 51 percent on January 1 involved high blood alcohol concentrations. These proportions compare with 33 percent on December 25 and January 8 (days in close proximity that aren't associated with New Year's) and 31 percent on June 27 and July 11.
The fatality numbers cited above include drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. If we exclude the occupants of vehicles and consider the statistics from a pedestrian standpoint alone, New Year's Day is the most dangerous day of the year to be afoot on or around public roadways, followed closely by Halloween:
DAYS WITH THE MOST PEDESTRIAN DEATHS, 1986-2002
Total deaths
Avg. per day
January 1
410
24
October 31
401
24
December 23
373
22
December 20
357
21
November 2
351
21
October 26
350
21
November 3
348
20
November 10
344
20
November 1
340
20
December 18
339
20
It should be noted that although traffic-related deaths may increase around certain holidays, the number of fatalities across the entire 17-year period covered by the study still averaged 117 per day. As Allan Williams of the IIHS cautioned, "While more deaths do occur on some of the holidays, the toll of fatalities is relentless every day, all year long."
