Commercial Vehicle Crashes in 17 South Texas Counties

What this is

This page reports every commercial motor vehicle crash recorded by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in seventeen South Texas counties between August 1, 2024 and July 31, 2026. The counties are Bexar and the surrounding I-35 and I-10 corridor, the Eagle Ford Shale counties, and the coastal and border counties this firm serves.

The data comes from the FMCSA Motor Carrier Management Information System crash file, which every state reports into and which is published as an open dataset. It contains no information identifying anyone involved in a crash. It records the carrier, the vehicle, the county, the roadway, and the number of people killed or injured.

The finding: rural crashes are twice as deadly

Bexar County accounts for just over half of all commercial vehicle crashes in the region, which is what you would expect from its population and traffic volume. What is not expected is the difference in how those crashes end.

In Bexar County, 1.8 percent of commercial vehicle crashes killed someone. Across the sixteen surrounding counties, the figure is 3.6 percent — twice as high. In the Eagle Ford counties the gap is wider still. In McMullen County, better than one crash in nine was fatal. In Gonzales County, one in ten. In La Salle County, roughly one in ten. In Kendall County, nearly one in eleven.

Gonzales County is the clearest illustration. It recorded 88 commercial vehicle crashes over the two years — about four percent of Bexar’s volume — but nine deaths, against Bexar’s forty-one. A crash there was roughly six times more likely to kill someone.

Crashes by county, August 2024 through July 2026

Counties shown in red had a fatal-crash share above five percent. Percentages are the share of that county’s crashes in which at least one person died.

Why the rural counties are deadlier

Nothing in the data explains the gap on its own, but the operating conditions behind it are well understood and they matter in litigation.

• Two-lane roads at highway speed. Much of the Eagle Ford freight network runs on undivided farm-to-market roads never engineered for sustained heavy-truck traffic. Head-on closing speeds there are far higher than on a divided interstate.
• Emergency response distance. A serious crash in McMullen or La Salle County can be a long way from a trauma center. Time to definitive care is one of the strongest predictors of whether a survivable injury becomes a fatality.
• Vehicle mix. Oilfield service traffic runs heavier and more specialized than general freight — tank trucks, vacuum trucks, winch and rig-up trucks, sand haulers — and often on schedules tied to well operations.
• Out-of-state carriers. Nearly three in ten crashes in this region involved a carrier based outside Texas. That affects where suit can be filed, which insurer responds, and how quickly evidence has to be preserved before a truck leaves the state.

What this means if you were in one of these crashes

Two practical points follow from the data rather than from advocacy.

Evidence disappears on a schedule. Federal regulations require motor carriers to keep driver logs, inspection reports and supporting documents for defined periods — some as short as six months. Electronic control module data can be overwritten when a truck returns to service. A preservation letter sent early is the difference between having those records and arguing about why they are gone.

The carrier’s history is public before anyone files anything. A carrier’s federal safety record — inspection results, out-of-service rates, prior crashes, and the liability coverage it has on file — is available from public federal databases using only its USDOT number, which appears on the side of the truck and on the crash report.

Last updated August 28, 2026. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.