Drunk Driving Rates vs. Totals: AKA Math that Makes Paris Hilton's Head Hurt

In the recent blog posting by Laurie on drunk driving fatalities Steve made a great point about drunk driving rates versus totals. The map we made showed which counties in the USA had the highest total drunk driving fatalities. Steve brought up the point that the map is skewed by population. The more people in a county the more drunk driving fatalities that are likely. The other way you can look at this is as a rate. For every 100,000 people how many drunk driving fatalities are there. So, David Hampton took on the task of calculating a drunk driving fatality rate for counties. He found a data set in GeoCommons with county population for 2005 and took the drunk driving fatality rate data set and did some math to extrapolate a rate per 100,000 inhabitants for every county in the USA. The winner….Bedford County, VA which is part of the Lynchburg metropolitan area. Bedford has 973 drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 residents, or roughly 1 in 100 residents are killed by a drunk driver.

//