Motorists Big Losers on Super Bowl Sunday

Car crashes -- even traffic fatalities -- up after the telecast

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 22, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Think being a linebacker in the Super Bowl is hazardous? Try being a member of the TV-viewing public.

In the first study of its kind, Canadian researchers have found a significant jump in the number of car crashes, injuries -- and even traffic fatalities -- in the hours after the Super Bowl telecast.

Raiders' and Buccaneers' fans need to pay extra attention to the score this year: The study also reports your chances of being in a car crash are higher if you're from the state with the losing team.

"The Super Bowl is the most widely watched regular television broadcast, with a viewing audience of about 130 million Americans," says Dr. Donald Redelmeier, lead author of the study.

"It's particularly appealing to young, healthy men who are the exact same people who get over-represented in fatal motor vehicles," adds Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

The study appears in the Jan. 23 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The results aren't surprising, says Dr. Tareg Bey, an emergency room physician and associate clinical professor at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.

"People have drunk alcohol and are in a 'winner' or 'loser' mood. Both can be dangerous when driving a vehicle," Bey says.

However, the study found those in a "winner" mood were involved in fewer accidents.

Redelmeier, who works at Canada's largest trauma center and previously worked in the United States, noticed "that there was a lot more business in the emergency department" the night of the year's biggest football game. So, he and his colleagues set out to see if their observations were matched by statistics.

After studying traffic accidents on the last 27 Super Bowl Sundays, they found that, yes, accidents were higher after the game, compared both with regular Sundays and with the time periods before and during the game.

This amounted to 1,300 more car crashes, 600 more injuries and seven more deaths nationwide in the hours after a Super Bowl ended.

By contrast, there were no significant differences between the number of fatalities before the game on Super Bowl Sunday compared to a regular Sunday. The same was true for the number of accidents before the Super Bowl compared to a regular Sunday. And there was a slight decrease in accidents during the Super Bowl telecast.

The most likely explanation? Alcohol, inattention and fatigue, Redelmeier says.

"The distinctive thing about the Super Bowl is that those three factors come together in an impressive way because it's such a widely shared cultural event in the United States," he says.

States with a losing team experienced more accidents than neutral states (up 68 percent), while neutral states experienced more accidents (up 46 percent) than the winning state (up 6 percent), the study found.

"Although this increase seems to be widespread throughout the United States and consistent across the years, affecting all sorts of people, the one distinction is that it gets particularly larger if the home team is playing and loses," Redelmeier says.

"If the explanation were entirely alcohol, that's not what we would expect. In our data we show that although there's a surge in crashes involving alcohol, there's also an increase in those that don't involve alcohol," he says.

All told, the hazards of driving the night of Super Bowl Sunday outweigh the dangers of driving on New Year's Eve.

"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 in the United States for the past two decades," the researchers write.

The researchers recommend three strategies for reducing fatalities and accidents on Super Bowl Sunday:

  • People should avoid unnecessary nighttime driving (if you have to go out for pizza, do it during the game, when accidents are on the wane);
  • Trauma centers should consider extra staffing that night;
  • Subsidized taxi fares or free public transit at night just might be a good idea.

"We are not recommending canceling the Super Bowl," Redelmeier says. "I watch it. It's a very exciting broadcast that is thrilling to many viewers. We're just advocating road safety because one bad motor crash is more painful than the most devastating Super Bowl defeat."

More information

Not only is there an increase in traffic accidents on Super Bowl Sunday, there is also a surge in gambling. For more on this, visit the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. The Partnership for Safe Driving has information on how to avoid traffic accidents.

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