The upcoming July 4 holiday is often accompanied by a rise in drunk driving fatalities, according to federal traffic data. Now, ahead of that grim prospect, a new study found that Texas has one of the worst drunk driving problems in the nation.
Online drivers-ed application Zutobi ranked Texas as the state with the fifth-highest amount of drunk driving in that report. To get its ranking, the company parsed data including the number of DUI arrests and drunk driving-related fatalities to create a score for each state.
Texas logged 1,495 DUI-related fatalities in 2020, the most recent data available. That’s up 12.2% since 2019. The state also experienced 316.8 drunk driving arrests per 100,000 drivers in 2020 and 8.5 drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 drivers during that time.
Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and North Dakota, in respective order, had the worst DUI rankings in the study.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, drunk driving got worse, according to the report. Nationally, there were 11,654 drunk driving fatalities in 2020, up 14.9% from the previous year, making 2020 the worst years since 2005 for such deaths.
The new report comes months after a separate analysis by an online car insurance marketplace ranked San Antonio as the fourth-worst city in the nation for drunk driving.
San Antonio recorded 1,111 DUI arrests per 100,000 residents over three years of FBI crime statistics, according to that report.
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This article appears in Jun 15-28, 2022.