Houston Has the Nation's Deadliest Roads with 12 Fatal Crashes Per Week

According to Texas state traffic records and an in-depth analysis conducted by the Houston Chronicle, the metropolitan area of Houston is by far the most dangerous place to drive in the United States. Every week, an average of 12 fatalities and 40 serious injuries occur.

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With an astonishing 2,700+ accidents happening weekly on the city’s roads, most of them are fender benders and other light collisions that only result in minor injuries. However, by the end of the year, the people of Houston have to cope with a death toll of more than 640 people who lose their lives on the city’s roads.

To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of losing three fully loaded commercial jetliners full of passengers year after year. Furthermore, approximately 3,000 people are severely injured every year.

The Situation Has Gotten Out of Control, And Few Drivers Seem to Know or Care

According to one of Houston’s top car accident lawyers, attorney Stewart J. Guss, the number of people who are getting into serious or fatal collisions in the Houston area is at an all-time high.

“It’s hard for people to truly grasp the volume of car accidents that take place in the Houston metro area everyday because each incident only affects a few people. If news stations reported every accident in the city, they’d have no time to report any other stories,” said Guss.

It’s this lack of awareness that is compounding the problem, as the vast majority of the city’s drivers simply don’t realize what kind of danger they’re in every time they hit the road.

HighSpeed Limits and Poor Road Design Aren’t Helping

So, what factors are causing Houston to be such a dangerous place to drive? There are more than 6,000 miles of roads in a city which has a population of more than two million people, so there’s plenty of space on most roads. However, many of the most dangerous freeways, parkways, and highways in the region have very relaxed speed limits and are designed specifically to facilitate an expeditious flow of traffic.

For example, some of the newly constructed sections of Grand Parkway have speed limits of 70-75 mph, yet the average motorist drives 80 mph in these areas. To make matters worse, crowded traffic often reduces the space between vehicles to such an extent that adequately breaking in time to avoid a collision becomes impossible.

Complacency and the Illusion of Invincibility are Preventing Correction

If you were to tell the average Houston driver that their city is the deadliest place to drive in America, their reactions would probably vary somewhere between being shocked to learn that and assuming that the injured or killed motorists did something wrong.

It can be easy to think that anyone who gets in an accident must’ve made a mistake, but many times, completely innocent and competent drivers are being slammed into by other reckless motorists through no fault of their own. Ultimately, Houstonians must be educated on the dangers of driving in their hometown and local authorities need to start enforcing stricter speed limits and traffic laws in the area.