Cobb County, Georgia is a large suburban county north of Atlanta that is home to over 750,000 residents. The county has grown into the third-largest county in the state, but that expansion hasn’t been without its growing pains. With more cars on the road each year than the one prior, the number of accidents in the county each year has grown steadily from 2013 through 2017, which represents the most recent data available for study.
The good news is that despite rising accident rates, the number of fatalities fell from 2016 to 2017. The Legal Definitions Data Team has broken down the statistics related to traffic fatalities in Cobb County in recent years; see the results below.
Cobb County Accident Statistics
Arguably the most eye-popping statistics provided by the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety may be the increase in the total number of accidents in the county. From 2013 to 2017, the number accidents increased from 23,597 to 35,140. That makes for an increase of 48.9 percent in the span of only five years. It represents an significant increase in the rate of collisions compared to prior 5-year periods.
Fatalities
Technically, the number of traffic fatalities has dropped slightly from 2013 to. In 2013, there were 59 traffic deaths compared to 53 in 2017. However it is worth noting that the drop wasn’t steady. In fact, the fatality rate was the lowest during 2014 and 2015 but jump back up to 59 in 2016.
Alcohol-related Fatalities
The most positive news from this study is the noticeable drop in alcohol-related fatalities in 2017 compared to 2016. Fatalities from drunken driving dropped by 25% from one year to the next, going from 20 in 2016 to 15 in 2017. It should be noted that the total number of alcohol-related fatalities in 2017 is still higher than the reported number in 2014.
Conclusion
There is good news to be found in these numbers, but it is mixed together with some bad. More than anything, these figures may be inevitable given the growth of the county and the explosion in the number of vehicles on the roads of Cobb County. There is no,way to sugarcoat the increase in traffic accidents from 2013 to 2017, but the large drop in alcohol-related fatalities from 2016 to 2017 is good news even if it isn’t statistically significant.
