If there is one week of the year to slow down on a dark Central New York road, it is the one that begins today.
Onondaga County drivers reported 232 deer crashes during November 8 to 14 across the four years from 2021 through 2024, more than in any other seven day stretch of the year. That works out to 33.1 a day.
By the last week of November the rate falls to 16.4 a day. Measured per day, the peak week runs at roughly double the end of the month.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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Why this week
The timing follows white-tailed deer breeding season. Bucks travel well outside their normal range looking for does, crossing roads they would otherwise avoid, and they do it without much regard for traffic. The animals are not behaving unusually. They are simply moving a great deal more than they do in October or December.
The individual worst dates in the four year record sit inside this window. November 10 produced 39 crashes across the four years, November 14 produced 38, and November 9 produced 37.
It happens in the dark
Across all 3,661 deer crashes the county recorded in those four years, 1,942 happened on a dark unlighted road. Another 350 happened on a dark lighted one. Together that is 62.6 percent after dark, against under a quarter in daylight.
The hours concentrate at each end of the day. The 5 p.m. hour is the single worst with 342 crashes over four years, followed by the 6 a.m. hour at 320 and the 6 p.m. hour at 308. Both commutes now fall in darkness, because daylight saving time ended on November 1.
Where
Manlius recorded the most deer crashes in the county over the period at 342, followed by the town of Onondaga at 305, Camillus at 296, Lysander at 284 and Cicero at 279. The ranking tracks where subdivisions meet farmland and woodlots rather than where traffic is heaviest.
How big the problem is
Deer accounted for 3,661 of the 46,596 crashes the county reported over the four years, or 7.9 percent. That is a larger share of the county’s crash problem than most drivers would guess, and it barely moves from year to year: 875 in 2021, 948 in 2022, 901 in 2023 and 937 in 2024.
Total crashes of all kinds fell about 15 percent over the same period, from 12,736 in 2022 to 10,845 in 2024. Deer crashes did not follow that decline, so they are a growing share of what happens on county roads.
Statewide, drivers reported 126,321 deer crashes across the same four years. Onondaga County accounted for 2.9 percent of them and ranked eighth among counties, behind Monroe at 5,450, St. Lawrence at 5,192 and Oneida at 5,019.
What actually helps
The state’s standing guidance is to slow down at dawn and dusk near fields and woodlots, to treat one deer as a signal that more are behind it, and to brake hard rather than swerve. Leaving your lane converts an animal strike into a collision with oncoming traffic or something fixed. Over these four years, 1,510 crashes in the county involved a guide rail and 575 involved a tree.
Sources
- New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, Motor Vehicle Crashes, Case Information: Four Year Window, 2021 through 2024, via the New York State Open Data portal.
Every average, percentage and per gallon figure here was calculated by CNY Signal from the records cited above.
