How Does North Carolina Stack Up Against the Rest of the Nation When It Comes to Driver Safety?
Recently Allstate released its annual America’s Best Drivers Report for 2016, showing which cities are becoming safer for drivers across the country, and shining a light on which cities are becoming more dangerous. When it comes to North Carolina, the results are mixed, mainly depending on how large the city is.
Cary, for instance, was one of the safest cities in the country for driving, ranking 16th out of the 200 top cities. While it dropped slightly from 2015’s ranking of 10, Cary is still fairly safe. And so is Winston-Salem, which moved up two spots from 38 to 36. From there, North Carolina cities aren’t seen much in the report until rank 71, which is where Fayetteville fell in the results. While this is up from the 90th spot that it ranked the year before, Fayetteville stills see its share of accidents. And from there, the rankings only start to drop lower.
Raleigh, our state’s capital, ranked 86, well below the rank of 77th it received in 2015. And Greensboro dropped as well, ranking 72nd in 2015 and 98 in Allstate’s most recent report. But perhaps no city has dropped as significantly as Charlotte. In 2015 Charlotte already had a fairly poor driver safety rating of 142nd within the ranking system, but that dropped even further in 2016 when Charlotte ranked as the 150th “safest driving city.”
Big Cities = Big Population = Big Risk
An obvious reason for the increase in all of North Carolina’s biggest cities is just that—because they are getting bigger. And with larger populations there are also more drivers on the road, making the risk of accidents even greater.
But while other states and cities have the poor infrastructure or population overload to blame, North Carolina’s greatest number of accidents are caused by simple driver error. When drivers are in a rush and speed excessively, or when they’re simply trying to take shortcuts to get out of traffic, mistakes can be made and accidents can happen.
If you’ve been injured in a North Carolina car accident, contact our car accident lawyers at the Rhine Law Firm. Bad driving, negligence, and hurting other people are not okay, and we want to help accident victims get the compensation that they’re legally eligible for.
