NEW JERSEY – New Jersey landed on a list of states with the fewest speeding tickets, according to an Insurify report.
While most Americans are eager to forget the shelter-in-place orders that defined the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many drivers haven’t forgotten many of the bad habits they picked up while the roads were empty.
Traffic fatalities have risen dramatically over the past couple of years, due in most part to Americans driving faster — and more recklessly — than ever before. Elevated rates of dangerous driving behavior are likely not disappearing any time soon, so drivers today should be cautious and practice safe driving when out on the open road, especially in areas where motorists are more likely to disregard local speed limits.
Curious to see which states’ drivers have the greatest need for speed, data scientists at Insurify turned to their database of over 4.6 million car insurance applications to identify the ten states with the most speeding tickets in 2022.
- National averages. Across the U.S., 9.18% of drivers have a speeding ticket on record in 2022. That’s roughly as many people as the number of Americans who say basketball is their favorite sport. Meanwhile, 35.0 drivers per 10,000 have a failure to yield (to another driver or a pedestrian) violation on record. While less common, motorists with a failure to yield violation on record are still about as prevalent on the roads as those driving an electric vehicle. The median maximum posted speed limit for urban interstates in America is 65 mph.
- Slow and steady in the Northeast. While drivers in the Northeast are not often thought of as the most easy going behind the wheel, Insurify’s 2022 data shows that they actually accrue speeding violations at below-average rates. Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Jersey all rank among the ten states with the fewest speeding tickets. Connecticut even has the least speeding-prone drivers in the country, with only 4.74% of the state’s motorists reporting a prior speeding infraction on record.
- Speeding and failure to yield violations are significantly correlated. Failure to yield infractions — either to another driver or to a pedestrian — are serious violations, and it turns out that their prevalence is related to that of speeding rates. Insurify data scientists found that, at the state level, citation rates for speeding and failure to yield infractions have a positive, statistically significant correlation (p-value < 0.05). This means that a state with a high share of drivers with a speeding ticket is also likely to have a high proportion of drivers reporting a failure to yield violation on record.
To identify the states with the most speeding tickets, the data science team at Insurify, a platform to compare car insurance quotes, turned to their database of over 4.6 million car insurance applications. When applying for auto insurance, applicants must disclose their state of residence and driving history, including any speeding tickets accrued in the past seven years. Analysts compared the number of drivers with speeding violations to the total number of drivers in each state to determine the state’s proportion of speedy drivers. Data on failure to yield violations (including failure to yield to another driver and failure to yield to a pedestrian) also came from Insurify’s database. The maximum posted speed limit in each state comes from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The findings in this article represent statistical trends found in Insurify’s database of over 4.6 million car insurance applications. The findings of this study are not meant to imply the direction nor necessarily the existence of a causal relationship. Rather, this is a presentation of statistical correlations of public interest.
