New crash data pinpoints the Texas corridors where a truck wreck is most likely to prove deadly.
A new analysis of Texas highway crash data has mapped exactly where commercial truck accidents are most likely to kill someone. The results point at a cluster of rural state roads in the Permian Basin where nearly half of all traffic is trucks, posted speeds approach 75 miles per hour, and liability exposure runs far above anything underwriters see on urban freeways.
The study, published by Dallas-based personal injury law firm Angel Reyes & Associates, examined five years of Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) crash records across approximately 58,000 miles of state highway. Rather than counting raw crash totals, it measured injury and fatal crash rates per 100 million truck miles. That method strips out the size advantage of high-volume urban corridors and ranks roads by how dangerous they actually are per mile driven.
The Permian Basin problem
The findings put West Texas at the center of the story. State Highway 349 between Patricia and Midland recorded the highest fatal truck crash rate in the study, at 13.88 fatal crashes per 100 million truck miles. That is 8.8 times the network average. Nearly three in 10 injury crashes on that stretch killed someone…