Is There Less Drunk Driving in the South, Or Just Less Data?

It makes intuitive sense that cities with high-density populations, low car ownership, and good mass transit systems have fewer fatal car crashes, and fewer fatalities involving intoxication, than cities where transportation almost always means driving. Cities with extensive subway systems -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington -- are all near the bottom of the list in automobile fatalities per capita, with or without intoxication. So are cities with dense residential cores, like Seattle and San Francisco.

While the findings in this week's Big Fix feature – tabled and graphed by John Nelson at IDV Solutions -- were generally intuitive, some points left us curious. Do high rates of fatal car crashes correspond more to the way cities are built, or where they're located? There was evidence for urban design as a determining factor some cities. But there's also a strong argument for a cultural-geography explanation. Fatal car crashes do tend to cluster regionally (see the map below) in Big Sky country and the Deep South. (These statistics are measured against miles driven, so the location of transit systems and walkable cities has no effect.)