New Year's Day is consistently one of the most dangerous days of the year for drivers. Not surprisingly, a unusually large percentage of car accidents tomorrow will involve alcohol -- in 2009, alcohol played a role in 40 percent of fatal crashes, as opposed to 32 the rest of the year.
But the geographic distribution of alcohol-related crashes, like their distribution across the calendar, varies widely. "A National Portrait of Drunk Driving," a map created by John Nelson at IDV Solutions' UX Blog, makes this conclusion visually obvious.
Using data from Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), Nelson mapped ten full years of accidents (2001-2010) on a hexagonal mesh of the United States. Each hexagon represents data collected from a roughly identical space with no regard to administrative boundaries. Their color indicates the percentage of accidents that involved alcohol. (The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration has all data from 1975 onward available for download, for all you data hounds out there.)
Larger hexagons correspond to more accidents -- in the densest areas, the hexagons swell to form a flush surface, whereas in rural areas, the shapes are much smaller. The darker the hexagon, the higher the percentage of crashes involving alcohol.
