Speeding is one of the most common traffic violations. Unfortunately, it is also one of the top contributing factors to fatal traffic accidents. In 2023, speeding contributed to 29% of all traffic fatalities across the nation.

Texas’s numbers are even worse. In 2024, speeding was cited as a factor in 35% of all traffic-related deaths in the state. Understanding the scope of the problem will help drivers avoid this dangerous behavior.

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Overall Speeding Accidents in Texas

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) publishes car accident statistics for the entire state and individual counties using data collected from accident reports. While these statistics are typically reliable, you must also understand their limitations.

The police can identify crash contributing factors in many situations. Driver admissions, eyewitness statements, and skid marks can help the police determine whether a vehicle was speeding before the crash.

Having said that, the investigating officers have little or no direct evidence of speeding in many cases. That means the numbers may not accurately reflect the scope of the speeding problem in Texas.

Additionally, traffic crashes can have multiple contributing factors. For example, a driver might cause a rear-end collision due to speeding and tailgating. Neither factor may have been enough to cause the crash by itself. However, the crash report would still list speeding as a contributing factor because it “contributed” to the collision.

With these caveats in mind, Texas had 158,364 collisions in 2024 where speeding was identified as a contributing factor. The state had 554,146 total crashes that same year. This means the police identified speeding as a factor in nearly 29% of all collisions.

speeding-in-texas-a-year-of-accident-data

Injuries and Fatalities From Speeding Crashes in Texas

Speeding includes two behaviors. First, it happens when drivers exceed the speed limit. Since the speed limit on a road is determined using factors such as the location, road design, and traffic volumes, exceeding the speed limit exposes the speeding driver and others using the road to the risk of a collision.

Second, speeding occurs when drivers travel too fast for the road, visibility, or weather conditions. Drivers who travel too fast for the prevailing conditions risk losing control of their vehicles and flying off the road or hitting other cars.

When drivers speed, they lose the time needed for emergency maneuvers, such as braking or swerving to avoid an unexpected hazard.

Speeding also increases the energy in a crash. In terms of physics, the kinetic energy of a vehicle increases with the square of its velocity—that means a car going 50 miles per hour has four times the energy of one traveling 25 miles per hour.

That increased energy raises the likelihood of crashes that cause serious injuries or fatalities.

In 2024, speeding accidents in Texas included:

  • 1,321 fatal crashes
  • 4,709 serious injury crashes
  • 21,027 minor injury crashes
  • 25,360 possible injury crashes

Since many of these collisions involved multiple road users, the casualties from these accidents included:

  • 1,466 fatalities
  • 5,921 serious injuries that incapacitated the victims
  • 29,545 minor injuries that produced visible but non-disabling injuries
  • 40,626 possible injuries that caused symptoms (such as pain) without visible injuries

The victims of these crashes suffered both physical and financial losses. For example, road users hit by speeding drivers may have incurred hospital bills and missed paychecks due to their injuries.

Fortunately, Texas law allows a crash victim to seek financial compensation for these losses when his or her lawyer can establish that the other driver acted negligently by speeding.

Speeding deaths decreased in 2023 compared to 2022. That’s a sliver of good news, but  it’s overshadowed by the fact that 2023 had more speed-related deaths than it did a decade earlier.

Texas’s Speeding Problem

Even if you avoid speeding yourself, you cannot avoid the impatient and distracted drivers who do. Speeding drivers have a higher risk of hitting other vehicles and causing serious or fatal injuries. When this occurs, a personal injury lawyer helps accident victims prove the speeding driver’s liability for their injury-related losses.