How Dangerous Is Your State For Drunken Driving?

How Dangerous Is Your State For Drunken Driving?
By SAMUEL WARREN

(Find your state in the list below)

If you want to avoid liquored-up drivers this holiday season, steer clear of Montana.

In 2007, the state reported 106 fatalities in crashes involving at least one driver who was legally drunk. That comes out to 11.1 drunken driving-related deaths that year for every 100,000 people living in the 957, 861-person state. What's more, that number is up slightly; in 2006, Montana reported 10.9 drunken driving-related fatalities per capita.

One reason: With less than a million citizens stretched across 146,000 square miles, Montana faces distinctly rural challenges.

"Eighty percent of travel in Montana is on rural roads," says Jim Lynch, director of Montana's Department of Transportation, head of its Highway Traffic Safety Office, and the governors' representative for highway safety, "So most crashes involve speeds in excess of 55 miles per hour. A more urban state like Massachusetts has less than 6% of its drivers on rural roads--the majority of its traffic is in urban environments at slow speeds. We also have much longer emergency response times because of the distance; the average response time in Massachusetts is about 20 minutes, while in Montana it's an hour and 20 minutes. So an accident in Montana is far more likely to be life-threatening."

2007 Fatalities per One Hundred Thousand People
1. Montana 11.07 (estimated population: 957,861)
2. South Carolina 10.50 (estimated population: 4,407,709)
3. Mississippi 10.35 (estimated population: 2,918,785)
4. Wyoming 9.37 (estimated population: 522,830)
5. Louisiana 8.57 (estimated population: 4,293,204)
6. Alabama 8.41 (estimated population: 4,627,851)
7. North Dakota 8.28 (estimated population: 639,715)
8. West Virginia 7.84 (estimated population: 1,812,035)
9. New Mexico 6.75 (estimated population: 1,969,915)
10. Arkansas 6.42 (estimated population: 2,834,797)
11. Tennessee 6.33 (estimated population: 6,156,719)
12. Oklahoma 6.05 (estimated population: 3,617,316)
13. Delaware 5.78 (estimated population: 864,764)
14. Missouri 5.75 (estimated population: 5,878,415)
15. South Dakota 5.65 (estimated population: 796,214)
16. Wisconsin 5.59 (estimated population: 5,601,640)
17. Texas 5.40 (estimated population: 23,904,380)
18. North Carolina 5.37 (estimated population: 9,061,032)
19. Arizona 5.30 (estimated population: 6,338,755)
20. Maine 5.01 (estimated population: 1,317,207)
21. Kentucky 4.95 (estimated population: 4,241,474)
22. Florida 4.88 (estimated population: 18,251,243)
23. Idaho 4.67 (estimated population: 1,499,402)
24. Georgia 4.62 (estimated population: 9,544,750)
25. Nevada 4.60 (estimated population: 2,565,382)
26. Alaska 4.39 (estimated population: 683,478)
26. Alaska 4.39 (estimated population: 683,478)
27. Nebraska 4.34 (estimated population: 1,774,571)
28. Virginia 4.30 (estimated population: 7,712,091)
29. Kansas 4.11 (estimated population: 2,775,997)
30. Pennsylvania 4.02 (estimated population: 12,432,792)
31. Oregon 4.00 (estimated population: 3,747,455)
32. Indiana 3.62 (estimated population: 6,345,289)
33. Iowa 3.55 (estimated population: 2,988,046)
34. Vermont 3.54 (estimated population: 621,254)
35. Hawaii 3.51 (estimated population: 1,283,388)
37. Ohio 3.41 (estimated population: 11,466,917
38. Illinois 3.38 (estimated population: 12,852,548)
39. Maryland 3.19 (estimated population: 5,618,344)
40. California 3.16 (estimated population: 36,553,215)
41. Minnesota 3.04 (estimated population: 5,197,621)
42. Michigan 3.03 (estimated population: 10,071,822)
43. Washington 3.01 (estimated population: 6,468,424)
44. Connecticut 2.88 (estimated population: 3,502,309)
45. New Hampshire 2.58 (estimated population: 1,315,828)
46. Rhode Island 2.36 (estimated population: 1,057,832)
47. New Jersey 2.29 (estimated population: 8,685,920)
48. Massachusetts 2.26 (estimated population: 6,449,755)
49. New York 1.99 (estimated population: 19,297,729)
50. Utah 1.93 (estimated population: 2,645,330)

To determine which states had the highest drunken driving death tolls, Forbes looked at the number of drunken driving-related fatalities in each state according to a compilation of motor-vehicle crash data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System. Released in August by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, an office of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the numbers reflect fatalities in 2007.

They then multiplied by 100,000 and divided the result by the Census population estimates for 2007. This determined the states with the most accident-related fatalities per capita where at least one driver had a blood-alcohol content of .08 or more.

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