The public-transportation-promoting blog Cap'n Transit published an interesting (and disturbing) map on Sunday that shows that Sullivan County has more car crash fatatities per person than any other county in the New York Tri-State area.
The map, which is reproduced with permission above, uses data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Census Bureau to show the number of crash deaths per capita by county in 2005. (Ulster and Sullivan county are included as part of the NYC metropolitan area, but Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie are not.)
The map shows higher rates of deaths per population per county as deepening shades of red. As you can see, the farther west you go from New York City, the higher the percentage of a county's population dies in car crashes. And the highest numbers seem to be concentrated in the Delaware Valley, or, as the blog calls it, the "Upper Delaware Valley of Death."
The reddest county of them all is Sullivan County, which had 6.49 fatalities per 10,000 residents in 2005. (The closest runner-ups for deaths on the roads are nearby Pike County, Pennsylvania, which had 4.11 crash deaths per capita that year, and Warren County, New Jersey, which had 4.04.)
Cap'n Transit has a few ideas about why Sullivan County and its western neighbors have so much vehicle carnage:
It may be that the fatalities are due to the large highways that cross these counties: Sullivan hosts NY Route 17, while Pike has Interstate 84 and US 206 and 209, and Warren has Interstates 78 and 80. It may be other factors: Sullivan was also highlighted by Slate Labs as the worst "food desert" in the entire Northeast, the county with the highest percentage of people (8.05%) living more than a mile from the nearest supermarket without a car. DWI is also a potential factor: if you can't get to a supermarket without a car, you probably can't get to a bar either.
Several people have commented on Cap'n Trade's post to wonder whether vacationers driving to Sullivan County might be to blame for its dangerous roads. Commenter City Lights writes:
I can't help but notice that Sullivan County is part of the "Borscht Belt" vacation area, with large numbers of seasonal urban drivers and vulnerable carless populations like grandmothers with small children. I have no idea what the size of this vacationing population is, but it may be worth looking at the seasonality of the crashes involving pedestrians.
