When driving on a freeway with three lanes, which lane is considered the safest to travel in?

The travel lane you choose can impact the likelihood of having an accident. Image: StockVault.com

Ever wondered which lane on the highway is the safest? I wondered this recently as I barreled down road at 65 miles an hour with my child in the car and traffic whizzed past me, some cars going 80. When it comes to highway safety, how can we be safe?

The highways in Southern California are notoriously heart stopping, and I drive them daily with my children, so I wanted to know. And boy was I surprised: It turns out that research points towards the fast lane, or left lane, as the safest.

The right lane is most commonly mentioned in accident reports, according to a survey by DFKOZ.Tumblr.coml

According DFKOZ.tumblr.com, the left lane has the fewest crashes. However, left lane crashes often cause severe injuries and often death.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like driving in the fast lane. It also feels lawless, and I don’t like being tailgated at 70 miles an hour.

Highway Merges Present Greatest Danger

But merging is not for the faint of heart, which is why the right lane has the highest rate of accidents. People exiting and entering the highway merge and can cause accidents.

The NCBI states this danger quite plainly:

“…semi-truck related crashes, higher number of lanes on freeways, higher number of lanes on ramps, speeding related crashes, and alcohol related crashes tend to increase the likelihood of sustaining severe injuries at freeway merging locations.”

Accident Rates Increase as Economy Bounces Back

According to Consumer Reports, deaths due to car crashes have suddenly spiked.

“After six years of steady declines in motor-vehicle deaths in the U.S., the initial data for 2012 grabbed the attention of many safety advocates when it showed a notable 5 percent spike. That means 1,700 more people died on our roads; the estimated total is 34,080.

What caused the additional deaths isn’t known, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration probably won’t have final 2012 data until early next year. But a number of safety experts note an increase in miles driven due to the easing of the recession and 2012’s exceptionally mild winter and spring.

In retrospect, the uptick in deaths shouldn’t have been surprising. “Economic recessions have suppressed traffic fatalities before, notably in the early ’80s and early ’90s,” Kenneth P. Kolosh, statistics manager for the National Safety Council, said. “Fatality numbers tend to bounce up in recovery periods.”

Lovely, news, isn’t it?

Defensive Driving: A Great Way to Prevent Accidents

We all know that people drive faster on highways, but did we know that according to the NHTSA 30% of fatal crashes were due to excessive speed?

Of course you’re not the one driving the excessive speed, it’s the idiot behind/beside/in front of you. Which makes driving defensively a great strategy.

Here are some tips:

• Keep your eyes on the road, hands on the wheel and avoid distractions such as  eating, tuning the radio or looking at navigation;
• Make sure to leave plenty of room between you and the car ahead. Use the 2-second rule: pick an object ahead, a light pole or mile marker, and when the car in front of you passes it, count “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi;” your car not should pass that object in less than 2 seconds;
• If someone is tailgating you, move to another lane;
• Be aware of the road conditions and maintain a speed that is safe for those conditions;
• Be aware of all the cars around you and keep an eye on them;
• Make yourself visible by using headlights and turn signals;
• Familiarize yourself with the route and road rules before starting your drive;
• Don’t be a hothead. The idiot in front of you won’t hear you yelling at him; you’re just putting yourself and your passengers in danger by reacting to his aggression.
• If highway traffic is too dangerous or frustrating, take another route.

Here’s another good reason to drive defensively: to avoid being part of a pile-up, another hazzard of living in Southern California (as well as other places, too).

According to Wikipedia, “Pile-ups generally occur in low-visibility conditions as drivers on freeways are sometimes caught out by driving too close to the vehicle in front and not adjusting to the road conditions.

Due to the high traffic speeds on the road, if one car develops a problem and suddenly halts, those behind it cannot stop in time and may hit it. Considering that these roads often have high traffic volumes, more cars are forced into braking and skidding, darting into other lanes and in front of oncoming traffic and so more vehicles become involved, creating a chain reaction effect.”

This doesn’t sound like a good way to spend your time. Personally. I have a low tolerance for accepting pile ups as excusable. We need to drive much, much more safely on the freeways.

Don’t Be A Yahoo

I see far too many yahoos driving 80MPH and zig-zagging on a stretch of open highway, so putting my family in the left lane is not in the cards for me. You’ll see me in the middle lane, maybe in the right lane and driving as safely as possible.

I hope that, no matter which lane you choose, you’ll remember each car is filled with beautiful human life and it’s worth your energy and time to focus on the task at hand, arriving safely at your destination.

Original post from Lindsay Kavet

About a week ago, I did something New Yorkers don’t do very often: drive a car. This gave me some time to think. To quote Bob Seger: 

your thoughts will soon be wanderingthe way they always dowhen you’re ridin’ sixteen hours

and there’s nothin’ much to do

What I started to ponder was this: what is the safest lane on the highway? There were plausible reasons to think any lane on a three-lane highway was safer than the others:

• The left lane: on one hand, drivers are moving the fastest in the left lane, which seems less safe. On the other hand, you could argue that the left lane is more likely to be empty.
• The center lane: seems like being hemmed in by cars on both sides would be much less safe. Yet, drivers in the middle lane also have more road to play with (e.g., they could safely swerve to the left if there was danger on the right.)
• The right lane: the right lane is the slowest lane of travel. However, it is also the lane most often used to merge or exit a highway, which can get hairy.

Without a clear answer, the only option was to turn to the data. Fortunately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) maintains the Crashworthiness Data System (CDS) as part of its National Automotive Sampling System (NASS), which is “detailed data on a representative, random sample of thousands of minor, serious, and fatal crashes.” Unfortunately, from what I could tell, the NASS CDS doesn’t track lane of travel in any structured way.

Nevertheless, one piece of the NASS CDS–the “accident description”–contains a linear narrative of the events leading up to the crash. Further, a large number of these narratives mention specifics lanes. So, I wrote a script to mine the data in two simple steps. First, a narrative had to include one of “three-lane”, “three lane”, “3 lane”, or “3-lane” to be considered relevant. Second, the script scans for the first lane mentioned in a narrative using terms like “right lane,” “lane one,” “1st lane,” “first lane,” “center lane,” and “middle lane." 

The technique appears to work fairly well. Here are two sample narratives it identified:

Vehicle 1 was heading eastbound on a three lane highway, in lane 1. Vehicle 2, a bus, was parked in lane 1 further east, stopped  after a previous collision. Vehicle 1 failed to reduce speed and struck Vehicle 2.

V1 (1980 Chevy Blazer) was heading South in lane three of a three-lane divided highway (no positive barrier–curb on both sides of grass median) when control was lost. V1 departed its travel lane to the left (East), jumped the median curb, travelled through the grass median and entered the Northbound lanes (three-lane highway, as well) after clearing the second median curb. 

Of the roughly 100,000 accident reports in the raw data, 8,069 mention a three-lane highway. Of those, 4,028 (50%) cite a specific lane: 900 left lane (22%), 1,513 middle lane (38%), and 1,615 right lane (40%):

If we modify the script to count total lane mentions instead of just the first lane mentioned, the results are even more dramatic. The right lane jumps to 10,899 mentions (46% of all mentions), while the middle lane (8,923, 37%) and left lane (4,089, 17%) drop.

So we have our answer: the right lane is the most dangerous lane on the highway, and the left lane is the safest. Granted, the methodology isn’t 100% bulletproof, but I consider it good enough to prove what we already knew–the Eagles had it wrong.

Life in the fast lane 
Surely make you lose your mind