Out of the 42,915 people killed on the roads last year, 21,837 were drivers, up 12 percent from last year. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise as fatal multi-vehicle crashes are up 16 percent year-over-year from 17,083 to 19,777. Hey, since nobody was on the road in 2020, who on earth were drivers going to hit? Well, a lot if I’m being honest. While overall distance driven was down in 2020, fatalities were up over 2019 by 2,279. In fact, 2020 was the deadliest year on American roads since 2007. NHTSA blames an increase in risky driving for this jump in fatalities, with 45 percent of 2020 fatalities involving speeding, intoxication, or lack of seat belt use. Couple risky behavior with an increase in miles driven, and it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the death count rose for 2021.
Speaking of risky behavior, the proportion of fatal crashes where intoxication was a factor rose 16 percent from 2019 to 2020, then another 5 percent in 2021. If there’s any silver lining, intoxicated fatalities fell towards the end of 2021. Hopefully people will continue to make better decisions and we’ll see fewer intoxicated road deaths this year.
Another driving habit affecting fatal crashes is speeding. Last year, 11,780 fatalities were related to speeding. That’s 27.45 percent of all fatal crashes, 522 more fatalities than last year when speeding-related fatalities made up 28.99 percent of all fatal crashes, and 2,188 more than in 2019, when speeding-related fatalities made up 26.38 percent of all fatal crashes. Honestly, I expected this year’s number to be higher given how more people are driving more often than in 2020. Plus, a 2016 AAA report found that 48 percent of Americans reported going 15 mph over the speed limit in the month before the survey and roughly 45 percent admitted to going 10 mph above the speed limit on a residential street in the month before the survey. A similar report in 2020 found that 51 percent of drivers who increased their time on the roads in 2020 admitted to driving 10 mph above the speed limit on a residential street in the month before the survey. I guess those empty roads filled back up really quickly.
Next to drivers, fatalities involving pedestrians and large trucks are way, way up by 13 percent each. 7,432 pedestrians died on American roads last year, while 5,601 Americans died in collisions with large trucks. In 2019, the last year of normal pre-pandemic traffic, those figures were 6,272 and 5,032 respectively. With large trucks, the solution is often easy – give them a wide berth. It’s no secret that trucks have enormous blind spots and long stopping distances. The more room around trucks, the better.
As for pedestrians, that’s a tougher one to answer. On the one hand, I love cars. There’s something so wonderful about driving through the city at night, and I wouldn’t try to tote home a coffee table on public transit because I’d look like a complete asshole. On the other hand, I’m more often a pedestrian than a driver. What can I say, living in a walkable community is awesome.
Let’s start with the easiest thing to change and run through to the hardest. First up, the rise of SUVs. By now, it’s well-established that SUVs pose a greater risk to pedestrians than cars do. In 2018, the Detroit Free Press did some digging and found a 2015 NHTSA report that found SUVs and light trucks to be two to three times deadlier to pedestrians than cars. A small study run by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that fatal crashes between SUVs and pedestrians increased by 81 percent between 2009 and 2016 and found that even modern SUVs with deformable bumpers are significantly deadlier to pedestrians than cars are. Another IIHS study found that SUVs are 63 percent more likely than cars to hit pedestrians while turning.
At this point it’s really hard to argue that SUVs aren’t killing people, yet the government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy program is enabling manufacturers to keep cranking out SUVs. So how do we fix this? Well, a light truck charge to enter urban centers in an SUV or pickup truck would be great. There’s no need to ban large vehicles, but a gentle stick to encourage urban use for things like hauling furniture would keep casually-driven light trucks out of pedestrian-dense downtown cores. Make it tax-deductible so light commercial vehicles aren’t screwed over and bam. Of course, it would be absolutely hilarious to set up height restrictors at the entrances to nightclub districts and other pedestrian-heavy areas, but that might be a bit barbaric. Another way to fix this would be by relaxing the footprint model implemented in 2011 that heavily incentivized SUV production. It seems absurd that small cars should be held to much higher fuel economy targets when they’re already easier on the environment than large vehicles. As a bonus, they’re cheap to buy, cheap to run and kinder to pedestrians than light trucks.
[Editor’s Note: There’s been a lot of chatter around Twitter and various media publications calling for a ban on SUVs. I’m not for that at all. As someone who grew up in Germany, I love walkable cities, but an SUV ban infringes upon freedom of choice, plus it’s a slippery slope and it’s hard to enforce; it’s also just a lazy approach. I’m all for challenging automakers to improve pedestrian protection across all vehicles, perhaps to the point where only certain designs require specific pedpro countermeasures. “Ban SUVs,” though? I’m not about it. -DT]
Next, let’s look at pedestrian behavior. Just as the choices of SUV drivers increase pedestrian fatalities, so do the choices of pedestrians. An aggregation of NHTSA data shows that between 2010 and 2015, 68.4 percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred when pedestrians attempted to cross roads at points without intersections or crosswalks. I know that it can be a bit of a hike between crosswalks in some jurisdictions, but until road designers install additional crosswalks, a bit more walking could make the difference between getting home safely and not getting home at all.
In addition, drunk walking appears to be a bigger problem than I thought. The NHTSA’s latest complete pedestrian fatality report from 2019 says that 31 percent of all pedestrians killed in crashes had a blood alcohol level of 0.8 g/dl or greater, and that includes people under the age of 21. I know that alcohol impairs judgment but damn. Maybe take things easy and keep your friends in check the next time you go out.
Finally, there’s road design, which I touched on in the previous paragraph. A vast number of arterial roadways in America are technically known as stroads. If that sounds like a gross word, that’s because stroads are pretty awful. Take one cup of higher-speed multi-lane road design, add the business entrances and pedestrian walkways of a street and presto, you have a road design that does absolutely nothing well. They suck for pedestrians because cars keep popping in and out of vehicle entrances to stores, creeping onto the sidewalk because huge flashy signs prevent drivers from seeing shit. It also sucks to exit a store onto a stroad as a driver because of that appalling visibility and a certain moral instinct not to inconvenience pedestrians. Driving along the stroad? That’s also terrible. Stop, go, stop, go, stop, go, all the way along the goddamn street. It’s slow, it’s inefficient, and the shitshow of bidirectional traffic on the stroad and at most intersections doesn’t make things much easier. I mean come on, arterial roads are the perfect use case for one-way streets. Road designers and city planners really need to do better, plastering up lower speed limit signs and installing speed cameras can only help so much with infrastructure this bad.
Honestly, as much as new urbanists rant about pedestrian safety being a one-sided issue, it’s going to take everyone to cut pedestrian deaths in America. There are these great concepts called compromise and responsibility that civilized people hold dear. So talk your parents out of buying that Canyonero, put a hand out when your drunk friend tries to dart into traffic, and relentlessly tell your city councilors that you want safer road design rather than the band-aid of lower speed limits that drivers will continue to ignore. It’ll take a lot to cut overall road deaths too, from better driver behavior to better infrastructure design. I know that road safety is often a dreary subject, but it’s our responsibility to keep roads safe so we can keep our friends and family alive while still enjoying the cars we know and love. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of state-imposed, wallet-crushing cure.
Lead photo credit: Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com). Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Why have police response times increased? Why has violent crime increased? Why has shoplifting increased? Have we hired more police officers? Did we increase funding? Has respect for police increased? What about respect for laws and authority? When people don’t see cops on the road regularly, they speed. Many police departments have been reticent to project a strong police presence and I don’t see how that can help speeding or any other crime. There are consequences to childish, emotionally charged talking point and those consequences are far reaching when they tear at our social fabric.
What more laws and police DON’T do, is alter the baseline behavior of the population much.
What strict ‘law and order’ types frequently fail to understand, is that the baseline behavior of the population is governed more by general consensus that members of society have about the level of justice within their society, than it is by harsh enforcement and punishment.
This is easily observed by simple comparison of these characteristics between nation states.
It’s my opinion, that the increase in social stressors which occurred with the pandemic, led to many anti-social and self-destructive compensation mechanisms, such as increased alcohol and drug use/deaths.
This tendency probably has more effect on these numbers than most people appreciate.
It’s not just how many cops. It’s whether they’re good cops. We have a dramatic shortage of good cops. Most of them are somewhere on the “bad” scale.
“What causes crimes is societal and socioeconomic strife.”
Pandemics not withstanding, US poverty isn’t up. Quite the contrary. It’s down. We’re one of the richest countries on the planet. When people bitch about “the 1%” they’re talking about the majority of us.
There is a common thread though. General respect and care for other people. The problem we have is that not only do most of us not give a shit about each other, half of us actively loathe the other half of us. And yes, half. If we all had a little bit of respect for each other instead of performing a litmus test – be it money, politics, race, gender, sexuality, whatever – and then writing the other person off as less than human, then maybe we could talk about quantity of law enforcement officers relative to crime.
I agree that passing a law saying “SUV’s are now VERBOTEN” would be stupid —if nothing else suddenly nothing would be a SUV anymore according to some technicality—. But having more stringent weight limits and NHTSA pedestrian impact tests to pass would start going a long way towards making the more deadly designs impracticable to sell.
You’re not going to see a return to small cars in NA — many states aren’t keeping up on their roads and there’s less chance against a truck. What’s next, external airbags?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7SAzfTe30
I’m a driver in a college town. Pedestrians just step out into traffic with no regard for the laws of physics, not paying attention at all. Students choose to stand in the middle of the street on campus over standing on the plentiful and safe non-road areas of campus. In other parts of town, people walk in the streets when there is a perfectly good sidewalk they can be safe while walking on.
Now, just in case you’re thinking I’m totally anti-pedestrian, I think we can improve things for them to make things safer. More crosswalks with traffic control devices. You press the button, you wait for the signal, then you cross. Center islands for streets too congested or wide to cross in a timely fashion. Eliminate trees, bushes and other obstructions around crosswalks that hinder the view of drivers. No free flowing turns that make it impossible to cross the street safely. I would maintain the right of way for pedestrians in crosswalks who entered the crosswalk when the car had ample time to stop, but as a pedestrian I wouldn’t step out in front of an oncoming car until I was sure they saw me and were slowing down.
Nevermind that tax incentives are literally worthless with any major employer at this point; none of them pay any taxes as is and successfully blackmailed states into a zero-sum game of paying them to move their offices. Any business small enough to benefit from this already went 100% WFH just to save on the rent overhead wherever possible.
Restrictive zoning is the racism even liberals love.
I’m not saying people spent 2020 and 2021 on a 2 year binge, but like you, I know plenty of people who did.
“In addition, drunk walking appears to be a bigger problem than I thought. The NHTSA’s latest complete pedestrian fatality report from 2019 says that 31 percent of all pedestrians killed in crashes had a blood alcohol level of 0.8 g/dl or greater. . .”
You can’t ban those casually driven light trucks! Where else are people walking by supposed to throw their trash?
- Seat belt usage: If seat belts aren’t used, the car turns on its hazards, beeps the horn and makes a complete ass of itself until you do buckle up.
- Speeding: Average speed cameras and automated ticketing in high-fatality areas? Vehicle speed sign recognition and audio/visual alerts when the car is speeding (see seat belts above).
- Drinking and driving: Breathalizer interlocks are probably overkill. Perhaps cars of the future can learn to recognize erratic driving related to drunkenness and tiredness and be more proactive. In the end, most of this is a lack of personal responsibility and good citizenship. That is the disappointing part. Recommended reading: the National Roadway Safety Strategy, “Right of Way” by Angie Schmitt for pedestrian crashes, StrongTowns.org for more about “stroads”, and search for “unmarked crosswalk” in your city’s traffic code Speeder denouncing speeders. Got it. BTW, as cars have gotten safer, a person is likely to be killed while inside one. Really need to look not just at the very improbable fatality outcome, but also at the serious injury rates. To me that gives a better idea of road safety, since it reflects serious incidents, many of which could have resulted in a fatality if the cosmic dice had rolled a different outcome. Now, there was an article just the other day that the average vehicle age in the US is over 12 years old, and increasing. Without more data on the actual distribution of the vehicle ages, it’s harder to make an estimate on how long it will take for enough new pedestrian safe vehicles will have to be sold to start significantly impacting the death statistics, but it will obviously be years. As was pointed out in the article and by others in the comments, road design has a profound impact on the risk of collisions. A vehicle cannot hit a pedestrian if their pathways never cross. By separating pedestrian traffic from vehicle traffic (creating exclusion zones, pedestrian bridges, physical barriers, etc) no vehicle can hit a pedestrian. As a bonus, those features work as soon as they’re installed, for every single vehicle that uses that road. You have the added bonus of being able to target the areas with the highest risk first, making the biggest impact (no pun intended) immediately. As for crashes involving pedestrians, that could be explained by the increase in both cars on the roads and pedestrians out and about. After a period of light traffic and fewer pedestrians walking, as both now increase, the drivers aren’t expecting the pedestrians, and the pedestrians aren’t expecting the drivers. When I was a kid, I was taught to look both ways when crossing the street — even when the crosswalk signal indicates that I have the right of way. With inattentive drivers and poorly designed crosswalks* it’s all too easy for someone to make a mistake with dire consequences. You can have the right of way and still wind up in the hospital. I was visiting a new city recently and noticed that the crosswalk signals were positioned not directly across the street but instead on the post right above the “push for walk signal” button. This seemed odd to me until I realized that it encourages good situational awareness on the part of pedestrians. It forces you (or at least encourages you) to look in the direction the traffic is coming. When the signal changes, your head is already facing the traffic (doing half of the “look both ways” maneuver) so that you can tell if the car is not going to stop for you. It felt unusual at first, but it was much more intuitive than the traditional arrangement. *There is one intersection near my home that I think is a particularly egregious example of this. While the “walk” signal is on, drivers may make a legal right turn on red directly into the crosswalk. Since the drivers’ attention is turned the opposite way (checking to see if there is oncoming traffic), many totally miss that pedestrians are entering the crosswalk. Several people have been hit there. At least one died. I personally witnessed many close calls. The driver is most certainly in the wrong, but that’s of little comfort to the injured (or worse) pedestrian, and honestly if I were the urban designer I’d put up a “No Turn on Red” sign. Maybe stoned, drunk and depressed is not a plus for driving skills, but hey, what do I know? “It is not entirely their fault. Part of the problem is all those signs on the interstates that say: SPEED LIMIT 55. I am no psychologist, but I believe those signs may create the impression among poorly informed drivers that the speed limit is 55. Which of course it is not. We Americans pretend 55 is the speed limit, similar to the way we’re always pretending we want people to have a nice day, but it clearly isn’t the real speed limit, since nobody, including the police, actually drives that slowly, except people wearing hats in the left lane. So the question is, how fast are you really allowed to drive? And the answer is: Nobody will tell you. I’m serious. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy where the speed limit is a secret. I called up a guy I know who happens to be a high-ranking police officer, and I asked him to tell me the real speed limit, and he did, but only after — this is the absolute truth — he made me promise I wouldn’t reveal his name, or his state, or, above all, the speed limit itself. Do you believe that? Here in the United States of America, Land of the Free, home of the recently refurbished Statue of Liberty, we have an officer of the law who is afraid he could lose his job for revealing the speed limit.” Including 100% of drivers in Massachusetts, for a start. The legal distinction between cars and trucks continues to baffle me. If it is a road-going vehicle, it should be subject to the same safety and economy standards as any other road-going vehicle. There shouldn’t be a need to outright ban any particular class of vehicle, but the cost to own and operate should reflect the relative impact on roadways and other infrastructure.
