Crash Statistics | Storefront Safety Council

Driver age distribution

Most frequent locations

Most frequent causes

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Collecting data for 10+ years

The Storefront Safety Council searches out information on vehicle-into-building crashes, limited to commercial or public buildings, transit stops public areas and other non-residential structures.

Having gathered anecdotal and media reports, court records, police and fire department records, published studies concerning such incidents, and corporate-supplied data revealed in litigation, all incidents are then analyzed for details such as cause, age of driver, type of building, and other information, and are cross-checked for accuracy using court documents and police reports when available. The information is uploaded to our growing database, from which our statistical results are obtained.

2014-2021

From 2014 through 2021 we have collected data on:

stated causes of storefront and similar crashes
ages of drivers of vehicles involved in the storefront and similar crashes
category of buildings and businesses struck vehicle-into-building crashes for each state, ranked against each state's percentage of licensed drivers in the US

2016

In 2016, we expanded our research to analyze for the same data listed above and have begun to collect additional information that we have found to be statistically significant including:

Names of locations hit by vehicles if applicable (eg "Starbucks.")
Number and name of “brand/chain store” locations hit by vehicles.
Statistically significant causes previously captured as “other” include; vehicular assault on people, reckless driving, falling asleep at the wheel, weather conditions, speeding, and mechanical failure, driver distractions.
Statistically significant site types previously captured as “other” include; bus stops, child and elder care facilities, schools (K-12), churches, medical facilities, government buildings, gas stations, banks and hair and nail salons.

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2022

In April 2022 we completed an exchange of data and methodologies with an arm of Lloyd’s of London, the largest insurance market in the world. In exchange for the use of our data for their own risk assessment and risk profiling purposes, Lloyd’s agreed to review and audit our data and collection methodologies, the accuracy of our data, and the value of our data on an ongoing basis. Lloyd’s found that our data was valid and credible and that our collection methodology gave them such high confidence that our collection of data concerning vehicle-into-building / storefront crashes should be used by researchers and risk managers as “source data” given the lack of any other available data sets involving private property accidents in the United States.

Lloyd’s concluded in their remarks that our data, as complete as it is, reflects only a fraction of the total of storefront crashes that occur every single day: At the most conservative, it appears that the SSC database captures 1 in 12 incidents (8.33%).

Storefront crashes occur more than 100 times per day

46% of all storefront crashes result in an injury

8% of all storefront crashes result in a fatality

Each year in the US, as many as 16,000 people are injured and as many as 2600 are killed in vehicle-into-building crashes.