Special Report  ·  Substance Abuse & Road Safety

Impaired Driving in Wisconsin: What Five Years of Crash Data Tells Us

A statewide and county-by-county look at alcohol and drug-impaired driving crashes from 2020 through 2024 – the most recent complete data years – where the problem is getting better, where it is getting worse, and what and why the numbers say.

1. Why This Matters So Much

Every year, thousands of people in Wisconsin get behind the wheel after drinking or using drugs. We know this because of the crashes they cause — crashes that kill and injure at rates far higher than almost any other driving behavior.

In 2024, just 5.5% of all Wisconsin crashes involved an impaired driver. Yet those crashes accounted for roughly 28% of all traffic deaths that year — 163 people out of 576 total. That gap between crash share and death share is the most important thing to understand about impaired driving. These crashes do not just happen more often. They kill.

This report draws on two data sources: five years of Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) statewide crash statistics (2020–2024), and a county-by-county breakdown comparing 2023 and 2024. All county figures are measured per 10,000 residents, which allows fair comparisons between large and small counties.

2. The Wisconsin Statewide Impaired Driving Picture

2.1 Impaired Driving Overall

A note on how these numbers work: WisDOT counts alcohol-related and drug-related crashes as separate categories, but they overlap sometimes for a relatively small percent of the total — a crash involving a driver who had both alcohol and drugs in their system gets counted in both the alcohol total and the drug total. There is one additional distinction worth noting. WisDOT’s alcohol and drug categories include some non-motorists — pedestrians and cyclists — suspected of impairment and involved in a crash.

According to Stephanie Voller, Program and Policy Analyst – Advanced, at WisDOT, in a private communication with Wellbrook Recovery, these reasons explain how the alcohol and drug crash numbers combined can exceed the impaired driving total. The “impaired driving” umbrella figure excludes non-drivers involved as well as any duplicates from the count. The difference of roughly 530 crashes accounts for non-drivers and overlap of both substances in a single crash.

Looking at all substance-impaired crashes combined — alcohol and drugs together — the five-year trend shows modest improvement. Crashes are down about 9% since 2020, and fatalities fell from 210 to 163. That is undoubtedly real progress.

But there is a catch. While total crashes and deaths have edged downward, the number of people seriously injured in these crashes climbed back up in 2024 after hitting a low in 2022. Fewer deadly crashes is still not the same as the problem getting better.

2.2 Alcohol: The Bigger Problem, Going Nowhere Fast

Alcohol is responsible for the vast majority of substance-related crashes in Wisconsin — nearly four times more than drugs in 2024. And unlike the overall trend, the alcohol numbers have barely budged in five years, despite recent drops in alcohol health related suffering.

• Crash counts have barely changed. The 5,978 crashes in 2024 is only 72 fewer than in 2020 — a drop of just 1.2% over five years.
• Alcohol killed 153 people in 2024. That is roughly one person every two and a half days, year after year.
• Serious injuries rose sharply in 2024 (743), nearly erasing the gains made between 2020 and 2022.
• 2021 was the worst year across the board — crashes, injuries, and deaths all peaked as driving rebounded after the pandemic.

2.3 Drugs: Still Killing People, Despite Fewer Crashes

Drug-related crash numbers have declined steadily — down 28% since 2020. But that trend comes with an important caveat: these crashes remain among the deadliest on Wisconsin roads. In 2024, drug-impaired crashes killed 65 people and seriously injured 263 more. The per-crash fatality rate for drug-involved crashes is 4.01% — nearly nine times higher than the statewide average of 0.45% for all crashes.

Put simply: there are fewer drug-impaired crashes than there used to be, but when they happen, they are extraordinarily likely to kill someone. Declining numbers do not make this a solved problem.

3. How Deadly Are These Crashes, Really?

One of the most striking things in the data is the gap between how often impaired driving crashes happen and how often they kill.

A drug-impaired crash is nearly 9 times more likely to be fatal than a typical Wisconsin crash. An alcohol crash is more than 5 times more likely to kill. These are not slightly elevated risks — they are in a different category entirely.

3.1 Compared to Other Dangerous Driving Behaviors

Impaired driving is often discussed alongside distracted driving and speeding, but the fatality numbers tell a different story about which behavior is most dangerous.

Distracted driving causes more crashes than impaired driving, but kills far fewer people — 44 deaths versus 163. Impaired driving killed nearly 4 times as many people in 2024 despite causing fewer crashes. It receives less public attention than distracted driving, but the data suggests it perhaps deserves more.

4. The County Picture: Where It Is Worst in Wisconsin

Statewide numbers can hide a lot. When you break the data down by county — adjusting for population size so big and small counties can be compared fairly — a very different picture emerges. The problem is not spread evenly across Wisconsin. It is heavily concentrated in certain places, and in 2024, several counties got significantly worse.

4.1 Rural vs Urban: The Worst Performing Wisconsin Counties

Eight of the ten counties with the highest impaired driving crash rates in 2024 are rural. Most are in northern or central Wisconsin. These communities tend to have fewer law enforcement resources, longer distances between towns, and little or no public transportation.

Iron County’s rate of 31.58 per 10,000 is the highest in the state — more than 2.6 times the statewide average — and it jumped 64% in a single year. Kenosha may be known for its city, but the county has a significant rural component, and its high crash rate likely reflects that rural geography — consistent with the broader pattern, not an exception to it.

4.2 Where Things Got Worse in 2024

Douglas County stands out in a particularly grim way. Its crash rate jumped 75% in one year, and it recorded zero impaired-driving deaths per 10,000 residents in 2023 and 2.49 per 10,000 in 2024 — the highest kill rate in the state that year.

4.3 Where Things Got Better

These are real improvements, though a note of caution: many of these counties have small populations, which means a handful of crashes can move the per-capita rate dramatically. Sustained improvement over multiple years is the more reliable signal.

5. The Rural Factor: Why These impaired Driving Crashes Kill

The concentration of high crash rates in rural Wisconsin is not a coincidence, and the death toll is not random either. Rural impaired driving crashes are more lethal than urban ones for reasons that go beyond the impairment itself.

• Roads that leave no room for error. Nationally, about 64% of rural traffic fatalities involve a vehicle leaving the roadway, compared with 36% in urban settings. Many rural roads lack rumble strips, wide shoulders, or protective barriers. At highway speeds, drifting off the road is far more likely to be fatal than the same mistake on a city street. (NHTSA, 2022–2023 Rural/Urban Comparison)
• Speed makes everything worse. Rural areas account for 41% of all U.S. traffic fatalities despite making up only about 32% of vehicle miles traveled. Higher speeds combined with the lack of barriers mean crashes are simply harder to survive. (NHTSA FARS data)
• Help takes longer to arrive — and may not come at all. A 2023 survey by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health found that 41% of Wisconsin EMS agencies reported periods where they lacked adequate staffing to respond to an ambulance call, and 78% had been forced to request mutual aid from another agency due to staffing shortages. A 2025 UW-Madison La Follette School report found that 41% of rural agencies rely on six or fewer staff members to cover 80% of all their staffing hours — a razor-thin margin that creates real risk of dropped calls. Rural hospital closures have compounded the problem: when the nearest hospital closes, ambulances must travel much farther to deliver patients, extending the time they are out of service for their own communities. (Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, EMS Reliability Report, 2023; La Follette School of Public Affairs, UW-Madison, 2025)
• Law enforcement is spread thin. A single deputy covering hundreds of square miles cannot maintain the same patrol presence as an urban police department. Enforcement deters impaired driving — but only where it exists.
• There is no alternative to driving. In most rural Wisconsin communities, there is no Uber, no bus, no cab. If someone wants to get home from a bar twenty miles away, they drive. That does not excuse the choice, but it shapes what solutions actually work.

These factors compound each other. An impaired driver on a rural road with no shoulder, no barriers, a 65 mph speed limit, and 14+ minutes from the nearest ambulance is in a fundamentally more dangerous situation than one in an urban setting. The crash data reflects that reality.

6. The Bigger Picture: Wisconsin Substance-Related Deaths Are Declining

The crash data does not exist in isolation. Statewide data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services shows that both opioid overdose deaths and alcohol-related deaths have been declining in recent years — a trend that provides important context for what is happening on the roads.

6.1 Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Deaths

Opioid overdose deaths statewide peaked at 2.40 per 10,000 residents in 2023 and have since fallen to 1.38 in 2024 — a drop of 43% in just one year. That is a meaningful shift, and it likely reflects a combination of drug supply issues, expanded naloxone access, and harm reduction efforts that have been growing across Wisconsin.

6.2 Wisconsin Alcohol-Related Deaths

Alcohol-related deaths statewide followed a similar arc: rising through the pandemic years to a peak of 5.74 per 10,000 in 2022, then declining to 5.07 in 2024. That is movement in the right direction, but remains above pre-2020 levels.

6.3 What Latest Death Rates Mean for the Impaired Driving Data

The decline in opioid deaths are broadly reflected in the decline in drug-impaired driving crashes in the WisDOT data. While they are likely measuring different dimensions of the same underlying trend: Wisconsin’s overall burden of drug-related harm appears to be slowly easing, drug related crashes have not seen the dramatic drop that opioid related deaths have been experiencing.

Alcohol tells a more complicated story. Alcohol-related deaths are down from their 2022 peak but remain elevated compared to pre-pandemic baselines — which is exactly what the crash data shows too. The gap between where we are now and where we were before 2020 is a measure of how much ground still needs to be recovered.

7. What the Data Says We Should Do

• The alcohol numbers have barely moved. A 1.2% drop in alcohol-related crashes over five years is hard to call progress. Approaches that have shown results elsewhere — sobriety checkpoints, ignition interlock programs, sustained public awareness — are worth examining more seriously in Wisconsin.
• Fewer drug crashes, but still deadly. The downward trend in drug-impaired crashes is real and worth acknowledging. It is also worth keeping in perspective: 65 people died and over 1,000 were injured in a single year. Drug-impaired crashes kill at nearly 9 times the rate of an average crash. The trend is encouraging, but it is not a reason to ease up.
• Some counties are carrying a disproportionate burden. Counties like Iron, Juneau, and Douglas face rates well above the statewide average, often with far fewer resources to address them. Directing more state support toward the places where the problem is most concentrated seems like a logical next step.
• Getting people home safely is part of the equation. In rural communities with no ride-sharing, no bus, and bars that close at 2 a.m., the transportation gap is real. Designated driver programs, safe-ride initiatives, and creative local solutions have made a difference in other states and could here too.
• The serious injury rebound in 2024 is worth watching. Total crashes declined, but the number of people seriously injured in impaired driving crashes went back up. That kind of divergence — fewer crashes but more severe ones — can sometimes signal changes in speed or behavior that the crash count alone does not capture.

8. Conclusion

The statewide trend on impaired driving in Wisconsin is moving in the right direction, but slowly and unevenly. The broader public health picture — falling opioid deaths, declining alcohol-related mortality — points in the same direction. These are real improvements worth acknowledging. But the county-level crash data makes clear that the gains showing up in statewide averages are not reaching the communities that need them most. Behind the improving numbers are places where things got significantly worse in 2024, and people who paid for that with their lives.

163 people were killed by impaired drivers in Wisconsin in 2024. That number has come down from 210 in 2020 — and every life saved matters. But it is also one person killed every two days, year after year, by a cause that is entirely preventable. The data makes a compelling case for treating this not as a chronic background problem, but as an ongoing crisis with known causes and available solutions.