Pierce ranks high with 13,490 car crashes

Pierce County ranks second among Washington counties in the number of traffic collisions.

According to a report by the Washington Traffic Safety Commission covering the year 2015, Pierce: County recorded 13,490 total collisions that year. Only King County, with 40,962, had more.

The collision rate in Pierce was 209 accidents per 10,000 licensed drivers. There were 66 fatalities in those incidents, also exceeded by King County (109).

King and Pierce have the first and second-highest populated counties statewide.

The report covered only 2015, the most recent year for traffic accident statistics. The summary includes police -reported collisions on all public roadways in Washington.

In 2015, a motor vehicle crash occurred every four and a half minutes. A person died from one of these crashes every 16 hours.

Inattention and distraction remained the leading contributor to accidents among drivers and also among pedestrians and bicyclists.

The final report shows that there were 117,053 collisions in 2015, a 9 percent increase over the previous year. Of those 117,000-plus collisions, 499 of them were fatal, resulting in 551 total deaths. The latter statistic represented an increase of nearly 20 percent from 2014.