Size Doesn't Matter: Frequency of Car Accidents Appears Unrelated To Size of City

Looking at a large metropolitan area, whether New York City or Los Angles, at the incredible, intertwining network of roads, bridges, tunnels, overpasses and other structures that make up the transportation infrastructure, a natural assumption may be to assume that all that mass of streets and highways would lead to more traffic accidents.

A recent report released by the Allstate Insurance Company indicates that you would also be wrong. The report, entitled the "Allstate America's Best Drivers Report," ranks cities by frequency of car accidents.

Their numbers show that Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Boise, Idaho; and Fort Collins, Colorado are the cities with the longest periods between accidents, and Washington, DC; and Baltimore, Maryland have the shortest time between accidents.

Allstate uses this data to congratulate drivers in Sioux Falls as being the "safest drivers" in America. Nevertheless, what is more interesting is the result that Nate Berg, from the Atlantic Cities website, finds by graphing the data.

His graphs progressively remove the higher population cities, because they compress the bulk of the cities (121 out of 195) that are between 125,000 and 250,000. His graph of that population is instructive, as there is essentially no pattern.

There are cities with large populations with short frequencies between accidents and others with long periods. The same holds true for small cities. This appears to indicate that the size of the city has little to do with the frequency of accidents.

While living in particular cities appears to matter, as drivers in Sioux Falls have a lower risk than drivers in Washington, D.C., simply being in a larger city does not appear to carry an inherently larger risk.

While cars have become safer and in 2011 the nation saw the fewest number of traffic fatalities since 1949, that number was still more than 32,000 dead. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) details the staggering impact motor vehicle accidents have on the nation.

The CDC notes that car accidents are a major health hazard because they are the leading cause of death for person 5-24 years old and that in 2009, 2.3 million adult drivers and passengers wound up in the emergency room as the result car crash.

Many of those injuries result in long-term health issues, and the CDC calculates the cost in 2005 at $70 billion.

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