- A study of accident data reveals 8-9 pm is the deadliest hour on American roads.
- Almost 2,200 fatal crashes and 2,350 deaths were recorded from 8-9 pm in 2024.
- Saturday night is the worst time to be driving, early hours of Tuesday much safer.
If someone asked you to guess the most dangerous time to behind the wheel, what would you say? Maybe 11 PM to midnight, when people are driving home from bars when they should really be getting a cab? Or maybe 4 AM, because although traffic is light, tiredness is an issue and too many drivers will ignore red lights?
Both of those very reasonable sounding answers are wrong, and by several hours, a new study by US law firm, Postman Law, has revealed. After digging into the NHTSA data connected to the shocking 36,297 fatal vehicle crashes that occurred in the US in 2024, the authors found 8-9 PM to be the most dangerous hour.
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Nearly one in three of the 39,254 lives claimed in those fatal crashes occurred in a six-hour window between 6 pm and midnight that accounts for only 25 percent of the day. And more than 2,100 fatal crashes and over 2,200 deaths were recorded between 8 PM and 8.59 PM. That compares with 950 fatal crashes and 1,029 deaths between 4 AM and 4.59 AM.
Deadliest Hours On US Roads
The authors hang the blame on some very obvious suspects. Fatigue, alcohol-related impairment, high speeds and driver distraction. Those factors conspire to make your journey back from work far more likely to end in disaster than the one you made heading into work that morning. Darkness also plays its part. It’s why the peak falls from 8 PM to midnight in the summer months to 4-8 PM over winter.
Sketchy Saturdays
Postman Law’s data crunchers also filtered the risk by day of the week, which showed Saturday to be the deadliest 24-hour period. Though to be fair, weekends overall, are bad, the span from Friday through Sunday accounting for almost half of all crashes.
The safest period to be on the road? That’ll be Tuesday and Wednesday, between 3 AM and 3.59 AM, when almost all of us are tucked up in bed.
