The National Safety Council estimates 433 people will be killed and another 52,300 seriously injured in car crashes during the Thanksgiving holiday period, between 6 p.m. Wednesday and midnight Sunday.
Already, it has been a particularly deadly year on the roads. Traffic deaths are up by about 10 percent through the first nine months of 2015 compared with the same time period last year.
In Georgia, the rise is even steeper at about 14 percent.
Earlier this month, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that 2015 traffic fatalities had already eclipsed last year's total. Last year, there were 1,170 deaths on Georgia roads; the human toll as of Nov. 20 was 1,210.
And here's a sobering reminder to always buckle up: the 13 percent of drivers and passengers who do not buckle up accounted for nearly 45 percent of fatalities in 2013, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Lastly, think twice before you drink and drive. A startling number of Atlantan's (63 percent) don't even know the legal limit for blood alcohol concentration (much less adhere to it). That's according to a new study by Responsibility.org.
The website has a cool tool called the Virtual Bar where users can input their age, gender, weight, height, type of drinks and amount of food consumed to calculate what their individual blood alcohol content might be on a typical night out drinking.
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