Georgia Auto Law Research · Study 01
Georgia Interstate Fatalities, 2022–2024
731 people died in 655fatal crashes on Georgia’s interstate system over three years. I-75 accounts for a third of them — and nearly three in ten of these crashes involved a large truck.
Analysis by Georgia Auto Law · Reviewed by Mark Wade · Source: NHTSA FARS 2022–2024
Key Findings
731
deaths on Georgia interstates across 655 fatal crashes — 14.6% of every fatal crash in the state.
28.9%
of interstate fatal crashes involved a large truck, against 13.4% statewide — 2.7 times the off-interstate rate.
60%
of interstate deaths happened between 8pm and 6am, on roads that carry far less traffic in those hours.
−29.5%
fall in interstate deaths from 281 in 2022 to 198in 2024. Georgia’s statewide decline (−21.9%) far outpaced the national one (−8.1%).
Deaths by Interstate
Every interstate in Georgia with at least five deaths over the three years. These are counts, not rates — see Methodology for why no per-mile or per-vehicle-mile normalisation is offered here.
| Interstate | Deaths | 2022 → 2024 | Truck % | 8pm–6am | Most deaths |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I-75 | 242 | 92 → 81 → 69 | 33% | 64% | Fulton (43) |
| I-20 | 155 | 58 → 50 → 47 | 27% | 61% | Dekalb (39) |
| I-85 | 103 | 40 → 34 → 29 | 22% | 58% | Fulton (23) |
| I-285 | 86 | 35 → 32 → 19 | 27% | 73% | Dekalb (49) |
| I-95 | 45 | 20 → 17 → 8 | 40% | 42% | Chatham (13) |
| I-16 | 36 | 11 → 16 → 9 | 41% | 50% | Chatham (7) |
| I-520 | 15 | 3 → 6 → 6 | 27% | 60% | Richmond (15) |
| I-575 | 11 | 3 → 8 → 0 | 27% | 18% | Cherokee (9) |
| I-185 | 9 | 5 → 1 → 3 | 0% | 56% | Harris (6) |
| I-475 | 8 | 4 → 3 → 1 | 17% | 38% | Bibb (8) |
| I-985 | 7 | 3 → 2 → 2 | 14% | 43% | Hall (6) |
| I-675 | 6 | 3 → 1 → 2 | 20% | 67% | Clayton (3) |
Full derived table, including urban/rural split and every corridor with fewer than five deaths: download the CSV. Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0).
Freight Corridors Behave Differently
The large-truck share is the sharpest signal in the data. Statewide, 13.4% of Georgia’s fatal crashes involve a medium or heavy truck. On the interstate system it is 28.9%— and on the two freight corridors it is higher still:
- I-16 — 41% of its fatal crashes involved a large truck, the highest of any Georgia interstate. It is the Savannah port corridor.
- I-95 — 40%, the Atlantic freight route.
- I-75 — 33%, and the highest absolute count: 69 of the 189 truck-involved interstate crashes in the state.
I-16 and I-95 are also the two least urban interstates in the set. Rural freight corridors combine higher speeds, longer emergency response times and heavier vehicles — and the fatality data reflects all three.
The Perimeter Is a Night-Time Problem
I-285 is the most concentrated corridor in the study. Every one of its fatal crashes was classified urban, DeKalb County alone accounts for 49 of its 86 deaths, and 73% of those deaths occurred between 8pm and 6am— the highest overnight share of any major Georgia interstate.
That inverts the intuition about the Perimeter. Its reputation is built on rush-hour congestion, but congestion produces collisions rather than deaths. The fatal crashes cluster in the hours when the road empties and speeds rise.
Deaths Are Falling, and Faster Here Than Nationally
Interstate deaths fell from 281 in 2022 to 198 in 2024. The decline is broad rather than driven by one corridor: I-75, I-20, I-85, I-285 and I-95 all fell year on year.
| Deaths | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 42,721 | 41,025 | 39,254 | −8.1% |
| Georgia, all roads | 1,796 | 1,610 | 1,403 | −21.9% |
| Georgia interstates | 281 | 252 | 198 | −29.5% |
Georgia’s road deaths fell nearly three times as fast as the national figure over the same period. This study does not attempt to explain why — establishing a cause would require exposure data and policy analysis this dataset cannot supply.
Methodology
Source. NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) national CSV releases for 2022, 2023 and 2024, downloaded directly from NHTSA on September 3, 2026. FARS is a census of every crash on a US public road that resulted in a death within 30 days.
Selection. Records where STATENAME is Georgia and ROUTENAME is Interstate. Routes were normalised from the TWAY_ID field by extracting the leading interstate designation, so that I-75, I-75 NB and I-75 SR-401 aggregate to I-75. Deaths are the sum of the FATALS field; crashes are record counts.
Large trucks are vehicle records whose FARS body type is a truck-tractor, a single-unit straight truck or cab-chassis over 10,000 lbs GVWR, a medium/heavy pickup, or an unknown medium/heavy truck. Light pickups and vans are excluded. A crash counts once regardless of how many such vehicles were involved.
These are counts, not rates. No normalisation by corridor length or vehicle miles travelled is offered, because FARS carries no exposure data and we did not have a verified Georgia interstate VMT series to join to it. A longer, busier interstate will accumulate more deaths than a short one without being more dangerous per mile driven. I-75 leading this table reflects its length and traffic volume as much as its risk. Read the ranking as where deaths occur, not as a danger ranking.
Other limits. FARS records fatal crashes only — injury and property-damage crashes are outside it entirely, so this says nothing about total crash burden. Crashes are attributed to the trafficway recorded by the reporting officer, so a collision on an interchange ramp may be coded to either road. State and US routes were examined and deliberately excluded: their TWAY_ID values are inconsistent enough (SR-10 appears in more than twenty spellings across three unrelated corridors) that aggregating them would risk attributing deaths to the wrong road.
Reproducibility. The derived table is published above as CSV. The FARS releases it came from are linked below and are free to download without registration. Anyone applying the selection rules described here to those files should reproduce these figures exactly.
Sources
- FARS 2022 National CSV — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- FARS 2023 National CSV — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- FARS 2024 National CSV — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- About FARS — system documentation and coding manuals
Reuse and Citation
This analysis and the derived dataset are published under CC BY 4.0. Journalists, researchers and public agencies are welcome to reproduce the figures and charts with attribution. Suggested citation:
Georgia Auto Law, Georgia Interstate Fatalities, 2022–2024 (2026), derived from NHTSA FARS. https://georgiaautolaw.com/research/georgia-interstate-fatalities
For questions about the method, or the underlying records for a specific corridor, contact us and ask for the research team.
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