Most dangerous holidays for driving

By Forbes.com

It's late at night on a holiday, and local emergency workers are on high alert.

In upstate New York, a speeding car splits into three pieces after slamming into a utility pole. In Longview, Texas, a drunken driver hits a Mitsubishi Montero, killing a college student. In Western Michigan, a driver loses control of her car and crashes into a parked ambulance.

Just another New Year's Eve, right? Wrong. These things all happened on Thanksgiving, the most dangerous holiday of the year for drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Thanksgiving is the day when heavy traffic, drinking and long-distance car trips combine to create fatal travel conditions.

"Now that airline ticket prices have increased, you have people trying to cram in as many activities as they can before they take that four- or five-hour trip home," says David Kelly, the acting administrator for the traffic-safety agency. That means more travelers dashing from a wine- or beer-soaked family gathering to the car to rush home so they can make it to work the next day.

The most dangerous holidays:

Rank	Holiday	Average vehicular deaths (2001-06)	Details
1	Thanksgiving	573	Whether from postprandial exhaustion or a little too much wine with dinner, AAA's biggest travel holiday of the year saw 623 traffic fatalities in 2006, the most recent year on record.
2	Independence Day	505	Keep an eye out for heavy drinkers who didn't have the good sense to stay home and off the roads. An estimated 53% of fatal Fourth of July crashes involve at least one drunken driver.
3	Memorial Day weekend	493	Hordes of beachgoers crowd the same coastal roadways on this holiday, when 38 million people hit the streets in search of a warm, out-of-town weekend.
4	Labor Day weekend	488	This long summer weekend makes our list due to overcrowded roads and out-of-town travel.
5	New Year's Eve/Day	421	Champagne and icy roads make Jan. 1 one of the most dangerous single days to be on the road all year.
See the full list

Behind the numbers

To develop our list of the most dangerous holidays for travelers, we used data from the traffic-safety agency's reports on motor vehicle deaths over three- and four-day holiday weekends from 2001 to 2006, the most recent data available. We then used the average to determine the holidays with the most traffic deaths.

Because drunken driving and road congestion contribute significantly to auto accidents during times of celebration, we included the percentage of fatal crashes caused by intoxication and the AAA-estimated number of cars on the road for each holiday period in our analysis.

It's not just the eating and drinking that make Thanksgiving so dangerous. Roads are packed with traffic, and after a long day with the family, drivers are often sleepy.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, 100,000 crashes, 71,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths every year can be attributed to falling asleep at the wheel. Add that to heavy holiday traffic and you have a recipe for disaster.

"Anytime you have a long weekend," Kelly says, "you have increased car travel, which increases exposure to traffic accidents."

Curse of the long weekend

Whereas some holidays can escape this prescription by occasionally falling in midweek, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day and Labor Day are blighted by design. They always fall on long weekends, creating unusually packed holiday rushes on the roads.

David Wiesenthal, whose research at York University in Toronto focuses on driving stress, vengeance and aggression, says the confinement can lead to aggressive driving. "When people are in very slow-moving traffic, they get stressed, and that leads to general nastiness, like horn honking, shouting and cutting people off."

All-day drinking and the already high number of travelers in vacation-heavy midsummer make Independence Day the second-most-perilous holiday, with almost 41 million people on the roads and more than half of all accidents caused by drunken driving. Memorial Day and Labor Day come in at Nos. 3 and 4, respectively.

Travelers are also at risk during big single-night holidays such as New Year's Eve and Halloween, which fell at No. 5 and No. 6, respectively, on our list. And because 30% to 60% more people die in motor vehicle accidents on weekends than during the week on normal days, party holidays that fall on a Friday or Saturday can be extra-deadly.

Obviously, the best way to stay safe on dangerous driving days is to stay home, take a train or fly, but many have no option but to drive. For these travelers, Kelly recommends the usual: Wear a seat belt, make a plan for getting home if you're going to be drinking and don't speed.

This article was reported and written by Jacqueline Detwiler for Forbes.com.

Published Dec. 22, 2008