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By The Estes Law Firm, P.C. — Richmond, Texas

The Texas Department of Transportation publishes a table each year counting commercial motor vehicle crashes by county. It is a plain document that gets very little attention. Read across the rows for the counties along Interstate 10 and US-59 between Houston and San Antonio, and one pattern is hard to miss: a commercial truck crash in a rural Texas county is far more likely to kill someone than the same crash in Harris County.

This page sets out the 2024 figures for those counties, the comparison against the metropolitan counties on either end, and what the numbers do and do not establish. Every figure is taken directly from the TxDOT table cited at the end. Nothing here is estimated.

The headline: rural crashes are deadlier per crash

In 2024, Harris County recorded 6,313 commercial motor vehicle crashes and 41 CMV fatalities — about 0.6 deaths for every 100 such crashes. Fort Bend County recorded 605 crashes and 2 fatalities, roughly 0.3 per 100. Bexar County recorded 2,684 crashes and 18 fatalities, about 0.7 per 100.

Now the corridor counties between them:

• Austin County (Sealy, on I-10): 74 crashes, 5 fatalities — 6.8 per 100
• Caldwell County (Luling): 72 crashes, 3 fatalities — 4.2 per 100
• Colorado County (Columbus, on I-10): 121 crashes, 5 fatalities — 4.1 per 100
• Wharton County (on US-59): 111 crashes, 4 fatalities — 3.6 per 100
• Fayette County (La Grange, on I-10): 101 crashes, 3 fatalities — 3.0 per 100

Austin County recorded roughly one-eightieth of Harris County’s commercial vehicle crashes and more than one-tenth of its commercial vehicle deaths. Per crash, the rate is more than ten times higher. The rates above are calculated from the TxDOT counts; TxDOT publishes the counts, not the ratios.

Why the pattern is not surprising

Three things differ between a truck crash on the Katy Freeway and one on a two-lane stretch of US-90A outside Flatonia.

Speed. Urban freeway crashes frequently happen in congestion, where traffic is already slowed. Rural highway crashes happen at or near posted highway speed, and the energy involved in a collision rises sharply with speed.

Road design. Much of the freight moving between Houston and San Antonio leaves the interstate for state and farm-to-market roads — two lanes, no median, narrow or absent shoulders, at-grade crossings. A loaded tractor-trailer and an oncoming passenger car separated by a painted line is a different physical situation from the same two vehicles separated by a concrete barrier.

Time to definitive care. The counties above are served by rural EMS and, in several cases, by hospitals without a trauma center. Transport to a Level I or Level II trauma facility can mean a helicopter or a long ground trip. In severe trauma, elapsed time is itself a clinical variable.

None of this is a criticism of rural emergency services, which frequently perform extraordinarily with limited resources. It is a description of geography.

The full corridor table, 2024

Reading the corridor

Guadalupe County is the volume outlier. At 423 commercial vehicle crashes it recorded more than double any other non-metropolitan county in this group — unsurprising for a county that Interstate 10 and Interstate 35 both cross. Its fatality rate, at about 0.5 per 100 crashes, looks more like a metropolitan county than a rural one, which is what you would expect where most of the mileage is divided interstate.

The I-10 counties west of Houston carry the highest severity. Austin, Colorado and Fayette together recorded 296 crashes and 13 fatalities. That is a fraction of Harris County’s crash count and roughly a third of its death count.

Frio County is the extreme. Fifty-six crashes and seven deaths — the highest ratio in this group by a wide margin. Frio sits where Interstate 35 crosses the western Eagle Ford, combining long-haul interstate freight with oilfield truck traffic on rural roads.

Several counties recorded no commercial vehicle fatalities at all in 2024 — Victoria, DeWitt, Jackson, Matagorda and Goliad. In counties this size, a single year is a small sample, and one year with no deaths does not establish a safer road.

What these numbers do not tell you

This is a count of crashes and deaths by county. It is not a rate per mile driven, per truck, or per resident, and TxDOT’s table does not adjust for traffic volume. A county with more freight moving through it will tend to record more crashes for that reason alone.

The table also does not distinguish fault. A commercial vehicle being involved in a crash says nothing about which driver caused it.

And single-year figures from small counties move a great deal. Frio’s seven deaths in 2024 is a real number, but drawing a trend from one year in a county that size would be a mistake. Anyone using these figures should say what year they are from and avoid treating one year as a pattern.

Why this matters to a family, not a statistician

If someone in your family was hit by a commercial truck on I-10 near Sealy or Columbus, or on US-59 through Wharton, the practical consequences of the geography above are concrete. The crash is more likely to have been severe. The responding agency may be a county sheriff’s office or DPS rather than a city police department, which affects how the CR-3 crash report is obtained. The nearest trauma center is likely in Houston or San Antonio, so the medical records will sit with a hospital system a long way from where the crash happened. And a case arising there is generally filed in that rural county’s courthouse, not in Harris County.

Evidence in commercial vehicle cases is also perishable in a way it is not in ordinary car wrecks. Federal motor carrier regulations require carriers to generate records — electronic hours-of-service logs, inspection and maintenance files, dispatch and telematics data — but those records are kept for defined periods and then lawfully discarded in the normal course of business. A truck that is repaired or sold stops being evidence. None of that requires anyone to behave badly; it is simply what happens when time passes.

Source

Texas Department of Transportation, Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) Involved Crashes and Injuries by County, 2024. Available at txdot.gov (retrieved 31 August 2026). Crash, fatal-crash and fatality counts are reproduced as published. Fatalities-per-100-crashes figures are calculated from those counts and are not published by TxDOT.

TxDOT publishes this table annually. This page reflects the 2024 data and will be updated when the 2025 table is released.

This article is general information about Texas law and publicly available crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Two of the attorneys at The Estes Law Firm are Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

The Estes Law Firm, P.C. · 716 S. Union St, Richmond, Texas 77469 · (281) 238-5400

Responsible attorney: William F. Estes.