The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has some interesting stats available to the public through their Fatality Analysis Reporting System. (We’ve done other articles using data from this system: here and here.)
One of the statistics they keep is the number of crashes during each hour of the day. We decided it would be interesting to see which time of the day had the most accidents on average and which time of day had the lowest number of crashes.
Here are the results from 2009 (the most recent available data) ordered from most crashes to least crashes:
1) 5pm to 6pm (1774 crashes)
2) 6pm to 7pm (1737 crashes)
3) 7pm to 8pm (1673 crashes)
4) 4pm to 5pm (1595 crashes)
5) 9pm to 10pm (1595 crashes)
6) 8pm to 9pm (1578 crashes)
7) 3pm to 4pm (1575 crashes)
8) 2pm to 3pm (1498 crashes)
9) 10pm to 11pm (1464 crashes)
10) 2am to 3am (1421 crashes)
11) 1pm to 2pm (1310 crashes)
12) 11pm to 12pm (1300 crashes)
13) 12am to 1am (1296 crashes)
14) 1am to 2am (1240 crashes)
15) 12pm to 1pm (1173 crashes)
16) 11am to 12pm (1099 crashes)
17) 6am to 7am (1015 crashes)
18) 3am to 4am (1000 crashes)
19) 10am to 11am (961 crashes)
20) 7am to 8am (903 crashes)
21) 8am to 9am (880 crashes)
22) 9am to 10am (874 crashes)
23) 5am to 6am (831 crashes)
24) 4am to 5am (756 crashes)
To answer the question posed in the headline of this article, the evening commute is substantially more dangerous.
There are some other interesting rankings in there, but we’ll leave that discussion and analysis open in the comments here, on Twitter and on the NMA Facebook Page.
