Pa. Drivers Rank 2nd Among Most Likely To Hit Deer

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Pa. (EYT) – A new study shows the chance of a Pennsylvania driver striking a deer is 1 in 71, ranking motorists in the Keystone State as second most likely to hit a deer.

For the eighth year in a row, West Virginia tops the list of states where a collision is most likely. The odds a driver in the Mountain State will collide with a deer are a staggering 1 in 39, nearly a 5 percent increase compared to 2013.

Ten percent of the country’s deer collisions occur in Pennsylvania (123,941 collisions), though when taking into account the amount of licensed drivers in the state, West Virginia still edges out as number one on the list.

Hawaii rounds out the bottom of the list also for the eighth year in a row with odds of 1 in 10,281. Hawaiians are three times more likely to get struck by lightning in their lifetime than they are to hit a deer in the next year.

U.S. drivers as a whole are nearly 3 percent more likely to collide with a deer in the next 12 months than they were last year, according to new claims data from State Farm. The odds drivers will hit a deer in the coming year are 1 out of 169, but that likelihood more than doubles during October, November and December, when deer collisions are most prevalent

More information on the study is available here.