Safe Driving Directions

Americans are very poor drivers. On average, there are 42,109 traffic fatalities each year in the United States - roughly one death every 12 minutes. If the U.S. had the same road safety record as the United Kingdom, you would expect around 8,170 deaths annually. The fact that there were 42,109 suggests that drivers in the U.S. are roughly five times more likely to die on the roads than drivers in the U.K.

In some U.S. cities, the situation is even worse. For example, the per-capita traffic death rate in Memphis is 22.3 per 100,000 residents - around nine times higher than the rate in the United Kingdom.

If you want to find out how deadly your local roads are, you should check out the TripRisk Road Safety Explorer.

TripRisk has mapped the deadliest roads in America and also shows which U.S. states have the highest road fatality rates. According to its data, Mississippi has the most dangerous roads in the country, with a fatality rate of 1.95 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). At the other end of the spectrum, Massachusetts emerges as the safest state to drive in, recording just 0.68 deaths per 100 million VMT -making it nearly three times safer than Mississippi. The comparison highlights the large differences in driving risk across the United States, shaped by factors such as road design, traffic enforcement, urban density, and driving behaviour.

The TripRisk Road Safety Explorer provides a risk score for every major road in the USA based on fatality rates per vehicle miles traveled. There is even a Trip Risk Route Planner that lets you choose between the fastest and the safest route, based on the TripRisk risk scores.