Drunk driving is illegal and clearly dangerous. But a lot of people don’t fully grasp just how risky it is. This is why people will still take a chance and drive drunk every single day, causing an incredible amount of serious car accidents.
For this reason, organizations like Mothers Against Drunk drivers (MADD) have gone to the trouble of compiling key statistics. These can show just how common drunk driving really is and how many lives it takes.
The key statistics
There are an incredible amount of statistics that you could study to understand this issue, but we’ve put some of the key ones below so that you can get a quick idea of the state of drunk driving in the U.S.:
- Every single day, there are about 300,000 instances of drunk driving. When you factor this out, that means that it happens 121 million times per year.
- When looking at drivers who caused accidents in which they passed away, it is found that about 57% of them had been using either drugs or alcohol before the crash.
- Drunk driving is more common at night, accounting for about one-third of all fatal accidents after dark. During the day, it still happens, but it’s much less common, at just about 9%.
- The age group from 21 to 24 causes the most fatal drunk driving accidents every year. These are individuals who can only recently drink legally, although there are also plenty of crashes involving underage drivers.
At the end of the day, it’s clear that drunk driving remains a serious problem on the roads in the U.S. If you have been hit and injured or if you’ve lost a loved one in a crash caused by a drunk driver, you need to know how to seek financial compensation for your losses.
