The Missouri State Highway Patrol publishes the hour of the day and the day of the week for every crash it counts, but only statewide. There is no St. Louis cut of these two tables in the compendium, so everything on this page is Missouri as a whole in 2023: 136,839 crashes, 905 of them fatal. The shape still matters to a St. Louis reader, because 30.2 percent of those crashes happened in St. Louis County or St. Louis City, according to the Patrol's county table.
621 crashes with no recorded hour are not charted.
The afternoon stretch
Crashes climb through the day. The 7 a.m. hour has 6,960 and the 8 a.m. hour 6,486, a morning bump of 13,446 crashes, 9.8 percent of the year. The count keeps building from late morning, and the peak arrives in three hours in a row: 11,477 crashes between 3:00 and 3:59 p.m., 11,424 in the 4 o'clock hour, and 11,148 in the 5 o'clock hour. Those three hours, one eighth of the day, hold 34,049 crashes, 24.9 percent of all of Missouri's crashes in 2023. The 6 o'clock hour falls to 8,014, and by the 4 a.m. hour the count is down to 1,265, the quietest hour of the day.
What the peak does and does not mean
The table counts crashes, not traffic. The afternoon is when the most people are on the road, so a high count in those hours is not proof that any given mile is more dangerous at 4 p.m. than at 4 a.m. The Patrol does not publish miles driven by hour, and this desk will not invent a rate.
What the peak does mean is that the typical reported crash in Missouri happens in daylight traffic, not in the middle of the night: 69.5 percent of 2023 crashes happened between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. That is the crash this desk's corridors page describes, the stop that comes a half second late in a line of cars.
Fatal crashes keep a different clock
Deaths do not follow the same curve. The single hour with the most fatal crashes was 6:00 to 6:59 p.m., with 70. From 6 p.m. to midnight Missouri recorded 291 fatal crashes, 32.2 percent of the year's 905, in hours that carried 22.1 percent of all crashes. Between midnight and 5 a.m. the gap is wider: 6.5 percent of crashes, 14.1 percent of fatal crashes.
Dividing one column by the other gives a rough measure of how often a crash in a given hour was fatal: 19.1 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes in the 1 a.m. hour, against 2.8 per 1,000 in the 8 a.m. hour. That is this desk's arithmetic on the Patrol's two columns, and it is in the table below for every hour.
| Hour | All crashes | Share | Fatal crashes | Fatal per 1,000 crashes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Midnight to 12:59 a.m. | 2,405 | 1.8% | 33 | 13.7 |
| 1:00 to 1:59 a.m. | 2,144 | 1.6% | 41 | 19.1 |
| 2:00 to 2:59 a.m. | 1,653 | 1.2% | 24 | 14.5 |
| 3:00 to 3:59 a.m. | 1,375 | 1.0% | 20 | 14.5 |
| 4:00 to 4:59 a.m. | 1,265 | 0.9% | 10 | 7.9 |
| 5:00 to 5:59 a.m. | 2,041 | 1.5% | 21 | 10.3 |
| 6:00 to 6:59 a.m. | 3,985 | 2.9% | 33 | 8.3 |
| 7:00 to 7:59 a.m. | 6,960 | 5.1% | 22 | 3.2 |
| 8:00 to 8:59 a.m. | 6,486 | 4.7% | 18 | 2.8 |
| 9:00 to 9:59 a.m. | 5,206 | 3.8% | 21 | 4.0 |
| 10:00 to 10:59 a.m. | 6,081 | 4.4% | 26 | 4.3 |
| 11:00 to 11:59 a.m. | 7,028 | 5.1% | 44 | 6.3 |
| Noon to 12:59 p.m. | 8,229 | 6.0% | 40 | 4.9 |
| 1:00 to 1:59 p.m. | 7,939 | 5.8% | 34 | 4.3 |
| 2:00 to 2:59 p.m. | 9,133 | 6.7% | 46 | 5.0 |
| 3:00 to 3:59 p.m. | 11,477 | 8.4% | 59 | 5.1 |
| 4:00 to 4:59 p.m. | 11,424 | 8.3% | 47 | 4.1 |
| 5:00 to 5:59 p.m. | 11,148 | 8.1% | 53 | 4.8 |
| 6:00 to 6:59 p.m. | 8,014 | 5.9% | 70 | 8.7 |
| 7:00 to 7:59 p.m. | 5,914 | 4.3% | 39 | 6.6 |
| 8:00 to 8:59 p.m. | 5,094 | 3.7% | 50 | 9.8 |
| 9:00 to 9:59 p.m. | 4,534 | 3.3% | 50 | 11.0 |
| 10:00 to 10:59 p.m. | 3,700 | 2.7% | 45 | 12.2 |
| 11:00 to 11:59 p.m. | 2,983 | 2.2% | 37 | 12.4 |
| Unknown hour | 621 | 0.5% | 22 | 35.4 |
| Total | 136,839 | 100.0% | 905 | 6.6 |
The week
444 crashes with no recorded day are not charted.
Friday is the busiest day, with 22,935 crashes, 16.8 percent of the year. Sunday is the quietest, with 14,979, 10.9 percent. Monday through Friday together account for 103,488 crashes, 75.6 percent, and 599 fatal crashes, 66.2 percent of the year's total.
The weekend runs the other way on severity. Saturday had the most fatal crashes of any day, 159, which works out to 8.9 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, and Sunday 8.2, against a range of 5.5 to 6.1 on weekdays.
| Day | All crashes | Share | Fatal crashes | Fatal per 1,000 crashes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 19,114 | 14.0% | 113 | 5.9 |
| Tuesday | 20,087 | 14.7% | 110 | 5.5 |
| Wednesday | 20,520 | 15.0% | 119 | 5.8 |
| Thursday | 20,832 | 15.2% | 118 | 5.7 |
| Friday | 22,935 | 16.8% | 139 | 6.1 |
| Saturday | 17,928 | 13.1% | 159 | 8.9 |
| Sunday | 14,979 | 10.9% | 123 | 8.2 |
| Unknown | 444 | 0.3% | 24 | 54.1 |
| Total | 136,839 | 100.0% | 905 | 6.6 |
If it happened at 5 p.m. on a Thursday
This is where the clock meets an actual clinic calendar. Missouri Injury Clinic's South County office on Tesson Ferry Road and its North County office in Hazelwood are open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to noon, and both close every day from 12 to 2. The O'Fallon office keeps Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday hours from 9 to 6 and sees Wednesday and Friday by appointment.
A crash in the afternoon peak lands after most of that day's hours are gone, so the practical call is the next morning. A Friday afternoon crash, on the busiest day of the week, lands after the Tesson Ferry and Hazelwood offices have closed for the week, and their next opening is Monday at 9. None of that changes the emergency rule. The symptoms in the box below are an emergency room trip at any hour.
Why statewide numbers on a St. Louis desk
Because they are the numbers that exist. The compendium's hour and day tables are statewide, and this desk would rather print an honest Missouri number with the label on it than a St. Louis number it had to make up. The county and city counts are on the five-year page, and the municipal counts are on the municipality page.
Sources
- Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri Traffic Safety Compendium 2023, table 1.16: 2023 Missouri Fatal and Total Crashes by Hour of Day of Occurrence.
- Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri Traffic Safety Compendium 2023, table 1.15: 2023 Missouri Fatal and Total Crashes by Day of Week of Occurrence.
- Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri Traffic Safety Compendium 2023, table 1.13: 2023 Missouri Crashes by County and Crash Severity.
Read the tables at the Missouri State Highway Patrol Traffic Safety Compendium on mshp.dps.missouri.gov. Tables pulled September 13, 2026. These are crashes reported into MOCARS, the statewide crash record system the compendium is built from. 2023 is the latest year the Patrol has published; its 2024 county table returned no rows on that date. Shares, sums, differences, and per-1,000 figures are this desk's arithmetic on the published counts, not numbers the Patrol printed.
Educational only. Nothing on this page is medical advice or a diagnosis; a licensed clinician who has examined you is the person to ask. Facts about the clinic come from moinjuryclinic.com. Crash counts come from the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Emergency symptoms go to the emergency room, not to a clinic or a website.