Myrtle Beach is home to beautiful beaches where tourists from all over come to swim, fish, surf and shell. But a new report claims the city also has one of the highest rates of car crashes involving pedestrian deaths among tourist hot spots in the United States.
Florida-based personal injury law firm InjuredInFlorida found that Myrtle Beach was the travel destination with the second-most crashes resulting in pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 in the United States between 2018 and 2022.
The report ranked cities on AAA travel website TripCanvas’s list of the top 50 travel destinations in the United States using data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
To rank the cities, the report analyzed the total number of crashes with pedestrian deaths and the population of each destination. According to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the city of Myrtle Beach had 14 such crashes between 2018 and 2022, and in 2022, the city had an estimated population of 38,417. Using these numbers, Myrtle Beach had 36.44 crashes resulting in pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people.
Tourism discrepancies
But is the ranking reflective of public safety in tourist hot spots? Not necessarily. Although the report focuses on tourism hubs, it doesn’t factor tourists into calculations.
For areas with lots of tourists, the year-round population often isn’t representative of how many people are in the city. The report, which a representative for the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce called, “obviously inaccurate,” looks only at each city’s population, so the number of crashes with pedestrian fatalities compared to the number of people in the area annually isn’t reflected in the ranking.
Myrtle Beach, for instance, has a permanent population of less than 40,000, but there can be many more people in the city. It’s difficult to find information about how many tourists visit the city of Myrtle Beach specifically, but travel performance data company DK Shifflet estimated that the Grand Strand had 17.6 million visitors last year.
With 14 car crashes resulting in pedestrian deaths in four years, the city of Myrtle Beach has the fewest number of any city in the top 10 ranking — it’s also the only city in the top 10 with a population of less than 100,000. Factoring in the millions of visitors in Myrtle Beach would change the 36.44 crashes per 100,000 people metric, but that’s true for every city.
Without factoring in data about the number of people that visit each city, there’s no comprehensive way to determine the true number of crashes that killed pedestrians per 100,000 people.
Top 10 deadliest cities
Using the report’s calculations without looking at tourists, the top 10 tourism destinations with the highest rate of car crashes fatal to pedestrians are:
1. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: 45.32 crashes per 100,000
Population: 183,146
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 83
2. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: 36.44 crashes per 100,000
Population: 38,417
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 14
3. Baltimore, Maryland: 34.39 crashes per 100,000
Population: 569,931
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 196
4. Albuquerque, New Mexico: 34.22 crashes per 100,000
Population: 561,008
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 192
5. St. Louis, Missouri: 31.75 crashes per 100,000
Population: 286,578
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 91
6. Detroit, Michigan: 29.66 crashes per 100,000
Population: 620,376
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 184
7. Phoenix, Arizona: 29.07 crashes per 100,000
Population: 1,644,409
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 478
8. West Palm Beach, Florida: 27.29 crashes per 100,000
Population: 120,932
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 33
9. Miami, Florida: 26.92 crashes per 100,000
Population: 449,514
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 121
10. New Orleans, Louisiana: 25.96 crashes per 100,000
Population: 369,749
Crashes with pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022: 96
Source Agencies
