With more and more vehicles on the road everyday, the number of accidents are also rising by the day. Even though many car accidents don’t always end in fatalities unlike motorcycle accidents, the victims are almost always in need of immediate medical treatment, care and even operation.
This has caused a lot of people to question whether driving personal cars is truly the safest way to travel each day, even though it’s more convenient than any other option, such as public transport. Ever since people began questioning whether cars are truly the safest way to go, a common question that’s popped up often is whether driving in rural areas is safer than driving in urban cities.
Let’s have a closer look at this question, and analyze the facts of both regions in detail below.
Where do accidents occur more often?
The answer may surprise you if you’d used your general knowledge to answer this question – a recent analysis found that accidents are more common in rural areas than in urban cities.
Though this seems strange, given that urban cities are way more populated than rural areas, and naturally have more traffic to navigate through, rural areas are actually more prone to accidents ending in fatalities than in cities.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the accidents that occured in 2019 were 2 times higher in rural areas than in urban cities.
This proves that even though you may assume that driving in rural areas and roads is not as dangerous as on busy city roads, the risk is actually higher and you need to be more careful. Let’s try to analyze the causes for both these accidents in the following sections.
Common causes of car accidents in busy cities
When you live in a city, there’s a chance of you encountering minor accidents every now and then, especially when you’re driving in peak traffic, or even on fairly free roads where people are prone to drive beyond the speed limit. Here’s a list of the common causes for auto-mobile accidents in urban cities:
- Too many vehicles on highways.
- Cars which tailgate other cars.
- Speeding and improper lane changes, especially when the drivers are distracted on their phones.
- Running red lights and reckless driving with no regard for traffic rules.
These are some of the reasons that cause most of the car accidents in busy cities, especially in places like Chicago, where over 100,000 accidents occur every year. That’s why most of the residents who live in accident-prone areas such as these take the trouble of inquiring about car insurance, and also hire a trusted car accident lawyer based in Chicago, whom they can consult whenever necessary.
Common causes of car accidents in urban areas
- Speeding is one of the most common reasons why people crash into other vehicles or hit other objects when driving in rural areas. This is due to the fact that the roads are fairly free (when compared to roads packed with traffic in cities where you can only move in inches during the peak hours), and most drivers tend to be more reckless when driving on traffic-free roads.
- Drunk driving is another contributing factor to the number of car accidents, especially in rural areas. In fact, the number of drunk drivers has fairly increased over the last few years.
- Not wearing a seatbelt has been a reason why even small accidents lead to bigger injuries – this is because the laws are not strictly enforced or followed in most small towns.
- A lack of stop signs and red lights could be one of the reasons why there are more vehicles driving at very high speeds.
- Unsafe roads and potholes are pretty common in underdeveloped towns, and this happens to be another reason why the road is a danger even to the drivers.
As you can see, when comparing the factors that cause accidents in both regions, rural areas are more prone to such incidents because the chances for frequent accidents are higher.
Photo by Nabeel Syed on Unsplash