Driving in Texas has always been stressful. In the rural parts of the state, the distances between destinations can be vast, while in the cities and suburbs, highways are often choked with traffic. But since the pandemic started in 2020, you may have experienced even more stress on the road than usual. Maybe drivers seem more aggressive and distracted, and casual disregard for rules such as speed limits, stop signs, and traffic signals seems more flagrant than ever before.

If all of that feels true to you, we can tell you this: You’re not imagining things. According to several studies, Texas drivers really have gotten worse over the past five years. But just how bad? That’s a bit of a complicated question. We’re worse than we’ve been in several decades—but then, so are drivers everywhere else in the country. So while the good news is that it’s not just us, the bad news is . . . well, it’s not just us. Below, we break down the various factors that go into determining whether and how drivers are getting worse, and how Texas stacks up. 

Where Does Texas Rank Against Other States? It Depends (But . . . Not Well)

Forbes began maintaining an index of the states with the worst drivers last year, updated annually. On the inaugural list, Texas ranked number one; in this year’s edition, published in May and drawing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2023 data, we dipped to third place behind New Mexico and Wyoming. (In your face, Land of Enchantment!) To come up with its ranking, Forbes analyzed fatal crashes to look for collisions that occurred because of drunk, drowsy, or distracted drivers, or those who were speeding or ignoring traffic signals. Each state was then assigned a score based on where they fall when those crashes are weighted and tallied. 

Unsurprisingly, given our rankings, we don’t fare well on any of the metrics the study considers, but we’re also not the worst in any category. We come in second on DWIs, fourth on drowsy drivers, sixth on speeding, tenth on collisions involving a distracted driver, and tenth on those that occurred when someone blew through a red light or stop sign. Of course, because the study is only taking into account crashes that result in death—not all collisions, or even those resulting in serious injury—we are left with an informative but limited picture of driver aptitude in Texas.

That is why it may be helpful to look at studies that consider different factors. Insurance aggregator websites often publish lists with more wide-ranging data inputs. One published by QuoteWizard in December 2022 places Texas in the middle of the pack. The list looked at collisions (including, but not limited to, fatal ones), DWI arrests, speeding tickets, and other traffic citations (for not wearing seat belts, failing to signal, rolling through stop signs, and other violations). Another study, from AgileRates, had us at number five for worst drivers. It considered fatalities, collisions, average miles driven per year, rates of uninsured drivers, and citations. In each study, those factors are weighted differently, hence the wide variance in ranking.

In other words, each study is a bit arbitrary. Learning how many drivers are killed when someone is speeding doesn’t tell you how frequently speeding actually occurs, only  when that speeding leads to a fatal crash; similarly, we can look at how tickets were issued to motorists who didn’t wear their seatbelts, but we can’t tell how many folks neglected to buckle up and got away with it. 

There’s not strong scientific data regarding aggressive driving, but the data that does exist—largely drawn from polling drivers to ask them about being tailgated, cut off, honked at, and more—suggests that it also is on the rise everywhere. (A poll from Forbes on confrontational driving puts us at number nine.) Road rage shootings are an extreme and uncommon example of aggressive driving, but they can be quantified; on that metric, evaluated per capita, we’re at number six, although the state with the most (New Mexico) nearly doubles the number of per capita shootings as we see in Texas. 

And Are Texas Drivers Getting Worse?

According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in the years from 2013 to 2019, Texas averaged 3,614 fatal crashes on its highways. In the years since the pandemic began, that number has jumped considerably: rising to 4,397 for the span from 2021 to 2023. The increase is especially pronounced in urban areas. 

It’s not just that the state’s population has grown, either. We’ve gone from averaging 1.36 fatalities for every 100,000,000 miles driven between 2013 and 2019 to 1.55 in 2021 and 2022—an increase of 14 percent. (The NHTSA hasn’t published its full 2023 data yet.) 

The numbers go up across all groups. Young drivers are involved in more fatal crashes than pre-pandemic, but so are drivers older than twenty-one. Fatalities have risen among those who wear seatbelts and those who don’t. Motorcyclist deaths rose by a larger margin among those who wear helmets than those who don’t, suggesting that, even if they may be suffering from the same increase in recklessness as their car-and-truck compatriots on the road, it’s not merely a disregard for personal safety that’s made the roads so dangerous for them.  

If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope, we can leave you with this: 2021 appears to be the high-water mark for fatal crashes on Texas highways. That year, 4,500 Texans were killed on the road; in 2022, we saw 4,408 fatalities, and in the Texas Department of Transportation’s data from 2023, that dropped to 4,283. All of those numbers are still well above the pre-pandemic average, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.

What’s the Impact on Cyclists and Pedestrians?

Our state’s increase in reckless driving is harming other types of commuters as well. Things have gotten disproportionately worse for Texas cyclists compared to those in other states. From 2017 to 2021, there were 34 percent more cyclist fatalities than in the preceding five-year period, the largest such jump in the country. That still doesn’t make us the most dangerous state to ride a bike in—we’re in third place, behind Florida and California, whose motorists each kill nearly twice as many cyclists as Texas’s. It’s also important to note these are raw totals, and don’t account for an increase in cycling—though surveys indicate cycling in Texas hasn’t increased at such a rate that would explain the jump in fatalities.

Things are worse for pedestrians, too. From 2013 to 2019, we averaged 579 pedestrian deaths in Texas. In 2021 and 2022, the most recent years for which data is available, Texas motorists killed more than 800 of those getting around on foot per year, an increase of nearly 40 percent. That’s a rate of roughly 2.75 pedestrians killed for every 100,000 residents. That only leaves us tenth in the U.S., but we’ve gone from averaging fewer than two annual pedestrian deaths per 100,000 Texans pre-pandemic to close to three, a tragic increase. 

Why Are Drivers Getting Worse?

Experts point to a number of factors that are present nationwide—and though we can’t say definitively how much they are impacting driver aptitude in Texas specifically, there’s nothing to suggest that Texas would be immune to national trends. According to several peer-reviewed studies (which are more reliable than the papers commissioned by insurance websites), the pandemic accelerated bad driving behavior. Since 2020, drivers are more stressed out; those who are more likely to engage in risky behavior are also more likely to have been on roads that were emptier than usual, creating bad habits that are hard to shake; and aggressive behaviors are on the rise. 

It’s not just the pandemic, though. Nationally, the ever-expanding size of trucks and SUVs make driving more dangerous than it was when most folks were in sedans. Despite the stereotype of a truck-obsessed Texas culture, we have a larger proportion of traditional cars to trucks and SUVs than most states (we rank number 34 on that front; Wyoming takes first place). The length of commutes is also important (and has increased in many places since the pandemic, including Houston and Dallas)—the more time you spend behind the wheel, especially at the end of a long, stressful work day, the more opportunities there are for things to go wrong—but there are twelve states that have longer average commutes than Texas. The relative youth and inexperience of the driving-age population can lead to bad outcomes, a factor that’s also influenced by the pandemic, as young drivers on relatively empty roads had extra time to develop bad habits. Texas, again, is in the middle of the pack when it comes to the average age of licensed drivers (Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah lead it). We’re not even in the top ten on street racing (Wyoming again!).  

All of which goes to say: these factors have almost certainly played a role in our state’s decline in driving aptitude—a three-ton pickup truck is dangerous whether it’s in Texas or Wyoming—but they’re not unique to us. You can decide for yourself whether that makes you proud, disappointed, or a little bit of both.

Is It Getting Better? 

We’ve already noted that when it comes to fatalities, while we’re worse off than we were pre-pandemic, we have seen some improvement since 2021. But when it comes to overall driving quality, it’s not so straightforward. Here’s the number of traffic stops issued by Texas Department of Public Safety officers year over year: 

2014: 2,245,107
2015: 2,135,751
2016: 2,244,856
2017: 2,600,538
2018: 2,953,280
2019: 2,788,211
2020: 1,667,553
2021: 1,687,895
2022: 1,671,833
2023: 1,375,081

At a glance, that seems like good news! In 2023, Texas motorists were issued fewer than half as many tickets as they got in 2018, so we must be getting better, right? The drop off begins in 2020—a year when fewer of us were on the roads as events were canceled, stay-at-home orders were in place for several months, work that was able to be completely remotely often was, and much of society went virtual. But it’s stayed low in the years since, making it a lasting trend and not a pandemic-era fluke.

So what’s going on? Well, something else happened in 2021: Governor Abbott initiated Operation Lone Star, under which  state troopers who might otherwise be patrolling the highways are conducting immigration enforcement. That September, Abbott ordered one thousand DPS officers to the border. The entire agency employs just more than 2,800 troopers, which means that more than a third of them were pulled off the roads across the rest of Texas for an operation that is still ongoing. 

It would be an overstatement to say that the reduction in traffic enforcement personnel on Texas highways is responsible for the increase in negative outcomes—drivers are worse in states that Greg Abbott doesn’t control, too—but it’s clear, given the increased number of fatalities on the road, that the dramatic reduction in traffic citations since 2020 isn’t because Texas drivers are getting better. We’re just getting fewer tickets. 

Ultimately, compared to the stereotype many have of Texans, our vehicles are a little smaller, our drivers are less trigger-happy, and our state troopers issue fewer tickets. While all of our trends are moving in the wrong direction, the majority of them are moving there a little more slowly than other states, which is perhaps a bit of cold comfort. It may never have been more dangerous to be on the road in Texas, but at least we’re not Wyoming.