Correspondence

Driving Fatalities on Super Bowl Sunday

N Engl J Med 2003; 348:368-369January 23, 2003

Article

To the Editor:

The Super Bowl is the most popular regular television broadcast in the United States, with an audience of about 130 million Americans. We studied driving fatalities on 27 consecutive Super Bowl Sundays, because alcohol, inattention, and fatigue are major contributors to fatal motor vehicle crashes.1 To do so, we compared each Super Bowl Sunday to the immediately preceding and subsequent Sundays (comparisons that controlled for season of the year, day of the week, and calendar year).

The time from kickoff to the end of the game defined three time intervals — namely, before, during, and after the telecast.2 The same times were used for corresponding control Sundays (to ensure identical intervals in relevant comparisons), and values were converted to Greenwich mean time (to account for varying time zones of telecasts and crashes). Population-based data on fatal motor vehicle crashes were obtained from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System3 for all available years (1975 to 2001).

We observed a 41 percent relative increase in the average number of fatalities after the telecast (24.5 vs. 17.3, P<0.001). In contrast, we observed no significant difference between Super Bowl Sundays and control Sundays in fatalities before the telecast (68.9 vs. 67.0, P>0.20) and a marginal decrease during the telecast (15.7 vs. 17.7, P=0.036). The increase in fatalities after the telecast was evident for 21 of 27 years and amounted to about seven added deaths on the average Super Bowl Sunday as compared with the average control Sunday.

The increase in fatalities after the telecast also applied to nonfatal injuries (Figure 1Figure 1Relative Increase in the Risk of Fatal Injuries and Nonfatal Injuries on Super Bowl Sundays, as Determined from Observed Counts, Shown as Percentages and 95 Percent Confidence Intervals.) and was generally larger in states with a losing team than neutral states and larger in neutral states than states with a winning team (68 percent vs. 46 percent vs. 6 percent, P=0.003). New York and Colorado had the most losses (five and four, respectively) and showed a 147 percent increase for the nine relevant years (95 percent confidence interval, 1 to 510). California had the most wins (eight) and showed no evidence of an increase (change, –4 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, –24 to 22) during those eight years.

The 41 percent relative increase in fatalities after the Super Bowl telecast exceeds the relative increase in fatalities on New Year's Eve that has prevailed for the past two decades in the United States.4 Hence, one option could be for sponsors to support subsidized public transit after the telecast. In the interim, clinicians in trauma centers might consider extra staffing, and clinicians in ambulatory care offices might warn patients to avoid unnecessary night driving on Super Bowl Sunday.

Donald A. Redelmeier, M.D.
Craig L. Stewart, M.Sc.
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M4N 3M5, Canada
dar@ices.on.ca

4 References

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   Evans L. Traffic safety and the driver. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991:133-88.
   

2. 2

   National Football League gamebook. Canton, Ohio: National Football League, 1975-2001.
   

3. 3

   Fatality Analysis Reporting System home page. Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2002. (Accessed January 3, 2003, at http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/main.cfm.)
   

4. 4

   National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Traffic safety facts 1994. Washington, D.C.: Department of Transportation, 1995:33.
   

Citing Articles (5)

Citing Articles

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   Donald A. Redelmeier, Christopher J. Yarnell. (2011) Lethal misconceptions: interpretation and bias in studies of traffic deaths. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
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   Stacy Wood, Melayne Morgan McInnes, David A. Norton. (2011) The Bad Thing about Good Games: The Relationship between Close Sporting Events and Game-Day Traffic Fatalities. Journal of Consumer Research 38:4, 611-621
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3. 3

   Jenny C. Su, Alisia G.T.T. Tran, John G. Wirtz, Rita A. Langteau, Alexander J. Rothman. (2009) Driving Under the Influence (of Stress): Evidence of a Regional Increase in Impaired Driving and Traffic Fatalities After the September 11 Terrorist Attacks. Psychological Science 20:1, 59-65
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4. 4

   G. P. McMillan, S. Lapham. (2006) Effectiveness of Bans and Laws in Reducing Traffic Deaths: Legalized Sunday Packaged Alcohol Sales and Alcohol-Related Traffic Crashes and Crash Fatalities in New Mexico. American Journal of Public Health 96:11, 1944-1948
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5. 5

   J.A. Stockman. (2006) Injury Risk to Restrained Children Exposed to Deployed First- and Second-Generation Air Bags in Frontal Crashes. Yearbook of Pediatrics 2006, 316-318
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