Higher Gas Prices Mean Fewer Car Accidents

Gas just crossed $4.00 a gallon again, according to AAA. For most Americans, that is nothing but bad news. But buried inside that pain at the pump is a pattern that researchers have documented for nearly two decades: when gas prices go up, traffic fatalities go down.

You might be wondering why a guy who's focused on law firm marketing monitors gas prices. Well, my company, Custom Legal Marketing, works with a lot of personal injury lawyers, which means I spend a lot of time studying various effects on caseloads. When working on a report on why personal injury lawyers get fewer cases in the first quarter of the year, I learned about the VMT metric (vehicle miles traveled), which is the indicator of how many car accidents we can expect.

With the chaos around the Iran war and daily ceasefire status changes, gas prices are causing Americans to cut back on spending and especially, driving.

Higher Gas Prices Directly Lower Vehicle Miles Traveled

The relationship is not a coincidence. It has been observed across multiple states, validated in peer-reviewed research, and confirmed by federal crash data going back decades. And with gas prices surging to their highest levels since mid-2022, the data suggests we may be entering a period where the roads actually get safer.

For personal injury attorneys, this is more than an academic curiosity. It directly affects case volume, case type, and the broader narrative around traffic safety that shapes how juries think about driver responsibility in car accident cases.

The Data: A Decade of Gas Prices and Traffic Deaths

The U.S. Energy Information Administration tracks average retail gas prices weekly. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration counts every traffic fatality in the country through its Fatality Analysis Reporting System. When you lay these two data sets side by side, the inverse relationship is hard to miss.

In 2014, regular gas averaged $3.36 per gallon nationally. That year, 32,744 people died in traffic crashes, one of the lowest totals in a generation. Then gas prices collapsed. By 2016, the national average had dropped to $2.15 per gallon. Traffic fatalities jumped 14.4% over that same two-year span, climbing to 37,461 deaths.

The pattern continued. Gas prices climbed modestly through 2017 and 2018. Fatalities edged downward. Prices softened in 2019 and 2020. Fatalities climbed again.

The pandemic distorted the data in 2020 and 2021 in ways that actually reinforce the underlying point. Gas dropped to $2.17 per gallon in 2020 as the economy locked down. Fewer people were driving, but those who were on the road drove faster and more recklessly on emptier highways. Fatalities spiked to 38,824 in 2020 and then surged to 42,939 in 2021, the highest total in 16 years.

Then gas prices shot up. In 2022, the national average hit $3.96 per gallon, the highest in nearly a decade. Fatalities began to decline. They dropped to 42,795 in 2022, then 41,025 in 2023, then 39,254 in 2024. NHTSA's early estimate for 2025 projects 36,640 fatalities, which would be the lowest total since 2014.

Now gas is climbing again. AAA reported the national average at $4.03 per gallon in mid-April 2026, up from $2.98 just seven weeks earlier. The EIA forecasts an average of $3.70 per gallon for 2026 as a whole, driven largely by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and sustained global crude prices.

If the historical pattern holds, higher prices at the pump could push fatalities lower still.

Why This Happens

The research on this relationship goes back more than 15 years, and the mechanisms are well understood.

Guangqing Chi, a sociologist who has been studying the link between gasoline prices and traffic crashes since 2008, has published multiple peer-reviewed studies on the subject. His work, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found a consistent positive association between higher gas prices and safer roads. The effects typically show up nine to ten months after a price change, and they hold across age groups, genders, and racial demographics.

The explanation is straightforward. When gas costs more, people drive less. They combine trips. They take fewer discretionary drives. The University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute documented this behavior during the 2008 gas price spike and found that as prices surged above $3.20 a gallon, monthly fatalities declined at rates far exceeding what safety officials had achieved through years of enforcement and engineering improvements.

But it is not just about fewer miles driven. People also drive differently when gas is expensive. They accelerate more gradually. They maintain steadier speeds. They brake less aggressively. All of these behaviors happen to be the same ones that reduce crash risk.

The effect is amplified among the demographics most prone to accidents. Younger drivers, who tend to have less disposable income and take more discretionary trips, cut back their driving more sharply when prices rise. Chi's research found that teenagers showed an immediate (though statistically modest) reduction in crashes when gas prices climbed. Elderly drivers, another high-risk group, also showed strong sensitivity to price changes, with effects that lasted longer than those observed in other age groups.

Rural roads see the biggest impact. Federal data consistently shows that driving declines have been more dramatic on rural roads when gas prices increase, and rural roads carry significantly higher fatality rates than urban highways. Research published in Traffic Injury Prevention found that gasoline price effects on total crashes, property-damage crashes, and injury crashes were all stronger in rural areas.

An international study covering 144 countries between 1991 and 2010 estimated that a 10% increase in gasoline pump prices corresponds to a 3% to 6% reduction in road fatalities. The researchers calculated that removing global fuel subsidies could prevent roughly 35,000 road deaths per year worldwide.

There is also a specific connection to impaired driving. Chi's research on drunk-driving crashes found that higher gas prices depress DUI-related crashes across every demographic group studied. The logic tracks: when people are watching their wallets, they take fewer late-night trips to bars and are more likely to consolidate outings or stay home.

The COVID Complication

Any honest analysis of this data has to address the elephant in the room: 2020 and 2021.

Gas was cheap during the pandemic. Driving was way down. By the traditional logic, fatalities should have fallen. Instead, they rose dramatically.

The explanation does not contradict the gas price thesis. It reveals its limits. When COVID emptied the roads, the people who continued driving did so with significantly less caution. NHTSA data showed increases in speeding, impaired driving, and failure to wear seatbelts during 2020 and 2021. The fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled surged to 1.34 in 2020 and 1.38 in 2021, even as total miles driven collapsed.

In other words, the pandemic created a temporary situation where fewer drivers behaved far more dangerously, overwhelming the normally protective effect of reduced driving. As pandemic conditions faded and gas prices rose sharply in 2022, the historical pattern reasserted itself. Fatalities have declined in every quarter since Q2 2022, a streak of 14 consecutive quarterly declines through the third quarter of 2025.

What This Means for Personal Injury Lawyers

The chart above shows the downward trend in searches on Google between March and April. This is a period that usually shows an increase in auto accident-related searches.

For attorneys who handle car accident cases, the relationship between gas prices and crash rates matters for several practical reasons.

Case volume projections. If gas prices remain elevated through 2026 and into 2027, as the EIA forecasts, law firms in markets that depend on motor vehicle accident cases should expect continued downward pressure on case volume. That does not mean cases will disappear, but the trend line is relevant for staffing, marketing budgets, and growth planning.

Case composition shifts. The research shows that higher gas prices disproportionately reduce certain types of crashes. Discretionary driving crashes, rural road crashes, younger driver crashes, and DUI crashes all decline more sharply than commuter-related accidents when prices rise. The cases that remain tend to involve commercial vehicles, distracted driving, and urban congestion, which are often higher-value and more complex matters.

Jury framing. In jurisdictions where jurors are commuting to the courthouse at $4.00 a gallon, their baseline attitude toward driving conditions may be different than it was when gas was $2.15. Jurors who are driving less themselves may be less sympathetic to arguments about unavoidable road conditions or heavy traffic.

Speed and severity. One of the mechanisms that makes higher gas prices safer is that drivers tend to go slower when they are trying to conserve fuel. Slower speeds mean lower crash severity. This could translate to fewer catastrophic injury cases and a shift toward less severe but more numerous soft-tissue claims.

The slip and fall ripple effect. The downstream impact of reduced vehicle miles traveled extends beyond traffic accidents. When people drive less, they also make fewer trips to grocery stores, shopping centers, restaurants, and other commercial properties. That means fewer bodies walking through doors, and fewer bodies walking through doors means slip and fall lawyers can expect to see fewer premises liability cases. The National Safety Council reports that more than 8.8 million people were treated in emergency rooms for fall-related injuries in 2023, with services, wholesale, and retail trade accounting for 60% of all slip and fall accidents. The National Floor Safety Institute estimates that restaurants alone see roughly 4 million slip and fall incidents per year. Every one of those incidents requires a person to physically be on the premises. When gas prices push consumers to consolidate errands, skip discretionary shopping trips, or shift purchases online, the raw volume of foot traffic in commercial spaces declines. Foot traffic data from retail analytics firms already showed the first material decline in brick-and-mortar visits during the second half of 2025 since the pandemic. For personal injury attorneys that handle premises liability alongside auto accident work, the same economic force that is reducing car crash volume may also be applying quiet downward pressure on slip and fall case intake.

The Counterpoint and the Motorcycle Exception

The gas price relationship is not uniform across all crash types. One important exception: motorcycle fatalities tend to increase when gas prices rise.

Research published in the Journal of Safety Research found that a one-dollar increase in adjusted gasoline price was associated with a 24.4% increase in fatal motorcycle crashes. When gas gets expensive, some drivers switch to motorcycles for better fuel economy. Motorcycles are inherently more dangerous. The net effect for motorcyclists is negative even as the roads get safer for everyone else.

Pedestrian fatalities also follow a different pattern. The same research found an 8% decrease in fatal pedestrian crashes with a one-dollar gas price increase, likely because fewer cars on the road means fewer opportunities for vehicle-pedestrian conflicts.

For motorcycle accident lawyers, the gas price signal points in opposite directions depending on the case type.

Where Gas Prices Stand Today

As of mid-April 2026, AAA reports the national average at $4.03 per gallon for regular gasoline. That represents a roughly 33% increase from a year earlier in many states. California, which already had the highest gas prices in the nation, is averaging $5.89 per gallon.

The EIA's April 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook forecasts retail gas prices peaking near $4.30 per gallon this month before averaging $3.70 for the full year. Diesel is averaging above $5.80 per gallon, which has significant implications for commercial trucking volumes and long-haul freight patterns.

These prices are being driven primarily by disruptions related to the aforementioned military operations near the Strait of Hormuz, sustained global crude demand, and seasonal spring driving patterns. The EIA projects prices will moderate somewhat in 2027, averaging $3.46 per gallon, but that still represents a significant premium over the $3.10 average in 2025.

If the research holds, and there is little reason to believe the fundamental relationship has changed, the roads should continue getting safer in the near term.