PennDOT Releases 2017 Crash Statistics
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) has released its annual report on the prior year’s crash statistics, revealing the lowest fatality rate recorded since the department started keeping records in 1935: 1.12 fatalities per hundred million vehicle-miles of travel. 2017 statistics, however, also include a number of crashes, injuries and fatalities. Here’s an overview of what happened on Pennsylvania’s roads in 2017.
- There were 128,188 reportable traffic crashes, the twelfth lowest total since 1950.
- Crashes claimed the lives of 1,137 people and injured another 80,612 individuals.
- There were 351 reportable crashes daily or about 15 per hour.
- There was an average of one fatality from a traffic crash every 8 hours.
- There was an average of nine injuries from a traffic crash every hour.
- One out of every 44 Pennsylvanians was involved in a reportable traffic crash.
- Total reported crashes decreased by 1 percent from 2016 to 2017.
- Fatalities decreased by 4.3 percent from 2016 to 2017.
- More than 40 percent of the crashes involved hitting fixed objects.
The report breaks out the data in many ways, such as who was involved (by gender and age), the types of vehicles involved, which days of the week and hours of the day had the most crashes, and crashes involving alcohol. There’s also a section on seat belts, child safety seats and air bags in crashes. The site also affords visitors the ability to create custom searches on statistics with the Pennsylvania Crash Information Tool.
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