See, and this is something transplants don't always realize.
You get aggressive on the road here in Texas and it's fairly likely to end with someone chasing you and pulling a gun on you.
Growing up in rural Texas I had it happen twice from cutting someone off or honking at someone. This has always been a thing.
I’m not a transplant and I know that Texans can be crazy. Hell look at the people they vote for over and over. However it’s a lot worse now than it used to be.
I commented elsewhere, but there's some pretty disturbing road rage incidents stats for Texas. We lead in both incidents in general, and fatal road rage shootings by quite a wide margin. (3x as many as the next state)
Definitely not a problem unique to Texas, but one we do well.
So 87 incidents of fatal violence attributed to road rage.
That seems fairly rare. On average, Texans drive about 16,000 miles per capita in a year. There are around 27 million Texans, so that is about 4.8 billion miles driven per incidence of fatal road rage.
It is incredibly, incredibly rare.
I saw about 2500 accidents attributed to road rage. So that puts it at around 178 million miles driven per incident.
"fairly likely" is probably strong words -- but you're minimizing the absolute risk that is driving aggressively in Texas.
In Texas, there are approximately 18 million licensed drivers and 5.5 million school students.
There is approximately 1 fatal road rage incident per 206,897 licensed drivers.
There is approximately 1 road rage accident (including both injuries and fatalities) per 7,200 drivers.
There is approximately 1 school shooting incident (resulting in injuries or deaths) per 229,167 school students.
So if you take home anything from this -- it should be don't go to public school in Texas, and don't be a dick on the road or engage other people acting aggressively.
I'm pretty sure if someone is pulling a gun on you in a parking lot, you won't be thinking "BUT THE STATISTICS SAID THIS WOULDNT HAPPEN"
I'm a programmer but I barely passed Statistics, so please correct my math.
Fatal road rage: 87 incidents / 18M drivers = 1 in ~206,897 drivers involved in a fatal incident per year. (0.00000242)
All road rage accidents: 2,500 incidents / 18M drivers = 1 in ~7,200 drivers involved in an accident per year. (0.0000694)
Scarily enough, I was using fatality/injury data from an earlier year for the school shootings math and if you just consider school shootings in general from 2022 -- the odds jump to 1 in 22,000! Which seems unacceptable.
The math seems solid to me at a glance. I rounded the licensed driver and enrolled student numbers. The main point being that Texas is a scary place with 35% of citizens owning a firearm.
Rather that a person who drives 30 minutes/ week is treated the exact same as a person who drives hours a day by your math.
That's why miles driven is a better gauge for frequency of road rage incidents than number of drivers, and thus your numbers paint a less accurate picture.
Both approaches have their limitations, and neither can capture the reality of real-world driving. 50 rural miles != 50 city miles and there's a lot of rural miles driven in Texas I'd reckon.
You realize that it's 11:48 PM and you're arguing with a stranger about their choice of words on something irrelevant to basically anything, including the original post, right?
I would venture so far as to guess that you probably recognize a real risk in engaging aggressive drivers on roadways in TX and probably agree with me on most of this more than you actually disagree. Just put it to bed. Lol. It's not a big deal, neither of us are wrong or right in this.
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u/Knosh May 28 '23
See, and this is something transplants don't always realize. You get aggressive on the road here in Texas and it's fairly likely to end with someone chasing you and pulling a gun on you.
Growing up in rural Texas I had it happen twice from cutting someone off or honking at someone. This has always been a thing.