Traffic fatalities of drivers who visit urban and rural areas: An exploratory study

• Prior work finds traffic deaths are higher on rural roads relative to city roads.
• We examine this pattern for drivers visiting from one region to the other.
• On rural roads, city residents have a considerably higher fatality risk than rural residents.
• On city roads, rural residents have a slightly greater risk than people from cities.

Traffic fatalities are considerably higher on rural roads than in cities. However, little research has considered where crash victims reside relative to the location of the crash. This study examined the fatalities of drivers who were visiting from different urban and rural areas, compared to local residents. There was an overall greater risk on rural roads, and this risk was even higher for city residents visiting these roads, one of the few instances that document a greater risk to drivers from urban (versus rural) areas. When looking at crashes occurring in cities, visiting rural residents had a higher fatality risk than city residents. Overall, these disparities could not be explained by motorists journeying any place far from their home—it was travel between urban and rural areas that accounted for the elevated mortality. The results show that the excessive fatalities in rural areas are not just a rural health problem—visitors from cities are in at least as much danger when driving on these roads. Understanding the excess fatalities of visitors has implications for how, and toward whom, driving safety messages might target.