As much as we always feel that New Jersey roadways can be filled with peril, the news is not all that bad. Especially when it comes to new drivers.

A new ranking has identified the safest and riskiest states for student drivers and highlights the most affected counties in each.

The number of fatal crashes was scaled against local populations to get a rate per 100,000 residents.

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The study ranks New Jersey as the fifth safest. Are you as surprised as I was to hear this news?

The study comes from personal injury lawyers at the Schiller Kessler Group, who analyzed crash fatality data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to determine the most dangerous states and counties.

They used the NHTSA data to correlate the number of fatal car crashes in each area with the presence of driving schools.

According to the study, New York is officially the safest state for student drivers, with 54.2% fewer crashes than the national average with 23.9 crashes per 100k residents across counties with driving schools.

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This figure is 54% lower than the national average (52.2 crashes per 100k),meaning student drivers are far less likely to be involved in a collision.

New Jersey is fifth, with 31.2 crashes per 100k, 40% lower than the national average of 52.2.
And while this may seem to go against logic, the very busy, extremely congested Hudson County is our state's safest, with 15.07 crashes per 100k residents, 87% safer than the average county, which experiences 144.43 crashes per 100k.

On the other side, the most dangerous state to be a student driver is South Carolina, where there are 91.1 crashes per 100k residents across driving school counties.

This is 75% above the national average of 52.2 crashes, suggesting that the state
is a much riskier place for inexperienced drivers than anywhere else in the United States.

Canva / Townsquare Media illustration
Canva / Townsquare Media illustration
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Here’s why this makes sense: we get more practice in difficult situations on the road and have to navigate more perilous roadways than new learners do in a lot of other states.

New Jersey being fifth safest for new drivers is actually not that surprising when you consider that the congestion of our roads and the dense population would require us to be better on the roadways just to survive.

After all, a wide open country road in Wyoming is much easier to navigate than route 287 during rush-hour.

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LOOK: Most dangerous states to drive in

Stacker used the Federal Highway Administration's 2020 Highway Statistics report to rank states by the fatalities per billion miles traveled. 

Gallery Credit: Katherine Gallagher

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Judi Franco only.

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