ACCIDENT STAT CHANGES IN A DECADE

Looking at accident statistics on a yearly basis can help you see trends and understand if the roads are getting safer or not, but yearly stats don’t always tell the whole story. It can be more helpful to look at long-term changes to avoid being influenced by outlier statistics. Fortunately, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration put together the “Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics” to help do just that.

In 2002, there were 38,309 vehicles involved in fatal car accidents. Out of those, 4,183 were large trucks. There were also 1,929,000 vehicles involved in accidents that resulted in injuries, and large trucks accounted for 90,000 of them. Finally, there were 4,348,000 vehicles involved in accidents that merely resulted in property damage, and just 322,000 of them were large trucks.

This clearly shows that large trucks are most likely to cause fatalities. Just 4.6 percent of injury crashes involved these vehicles, and just 7.4 percent of the cars in property damage accidents were trucks. However, 10.9 percent of the deadly accidents involved large trucks.

You can then jump forward to 2011, almost a decade later. That year, 29,757 vehicles were involved in deadly accidents, including 3,341 large trucks (11.2 percent). 1,530,000 vehicles were involved in injury accidents, including 60,000 large trucks (3.9 percent). 3,778,000 vehicles were in property damage accidents, and 210,000 of them were large trucks (5.6 percent).

As you can see, the general trends hold true, though trucks did cause a higher percentage of deaths in 2011, even though the overall numbers fell. If you’ve lost a loved one in a car accident in Pennsylvania, you may be able to seek compensation.

Source: FMCSA, “Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics,” accessed July 29, 2016