How dangerous is driving on New Year’s Eve?

By Sean McGoey As November gives way to December, most of the emphasis has been on Christmas. But New Year’s Eve is now just around the corner, and it brings elevated risks with it. A 2021 Yahoo! Finance article cites data from Womply showing that New Year’s Eve is the biggest sales day of the year for liquor stores across the U.S., with revenue jumping more than 159% over the average day. And any holiday with a heavy emphasis on alcohol consumption is likely to lead to a spike in deadly car crashes. To quantify just how much more dangerous American roads are over the New Year’s holiday, Sargon Law Group analyzed records of more than 12,000 fatal car crashes from the National Highway Transit Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System database, comparing crashes on December 31 and January 1 to similar periods in the four weeks before (December 3-4, December 10-11, December 17-18, and December 24-25) and four weeks after (January 7-8, January 14-15, January 21-22, and January 28-29). Key findings New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have 13% more fatal crashes than the same time frames in the previous four weeks, but the number of overnight fatal...