Traffic deaths jumped 12% through last fall, continuing pandemic surge, new data show

Traffic deaths increased 12 per cent through September last year, a surge the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tuesday represents the greatest percentage jump in year-over-year fatalities for the first nine months since at least 1975.

The agency estimated that 31,720 people were killed on U.S. roads last year through September, the highest total since 2006.

The figures released Tuesday underscore how an increase in deaths initially attributed to drivers speeding on roads emptied amid the pandemic has continued, even as people have gotten back into their cars. It also shows the scale of challenges facing the Transportation Department, which last week pledged to eliminate road deaths.

“We have to change a culture that accepts as inevitable the loss of tens of thousands of people in traffic crashes,” said Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s deputy administrator. “This will require a transformational and collaborative approach to safety on our nation’s roads.”

The increase in deaths has defied simple explanations and efforts at reversing it, but experts attribute it in large part to changes in behaviour that began when the coronavirus first spread.

Mike Hanson, director of the office of traffic safety at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said he expected that deaths would decline as people stayed home. Instead, he saw speeding and reckless behaviour take hold on the state’s roads.

“The speed at which those bad habits came back, I find it rather terrifying,” he said. “We erased almost 20 years of progress in reducing fatalities in the span of 24 months. Is this something we’re going to fix overnight? No, we’re not. It’s going to take some time.”

Minnesota has suffered a particularly sharp increase in deaths, seeing 266 in the first nine months of 2019 compared with 369 in the same period last year. Hanson said the state’s numbers for the first weeks of 2022 offer some hope the wave has finally crested, with deaths lower in January than they were in 2021.

Some states did see deaths fall last year - in a few cases to below where they were in 2019. Nebraska recorded its lowest number of deaths since 2016, according to the state transportation department. Officials said it’s not clear how it has been able defy the national trend.

Bill Kovarik, the state’s highway safety administrator, said his team launched an impaired-driving campaign in 2020 and a motorbike safety campaign last year while working with police on high-visibility enforcement - all fairly standard measures.

“I don’t know that we do have a magic bullet,” Kovarik said. “We’ve really been trying to work hard on what I’m sure every other highway safety office does.”

And in much of the country, the surge continued, according to NHTSA’s analysis of the data.

The data does include one bright spot: Even as the number of deaths continued to climb, death rates per mile in the spring and summer did not reach the levels of 2020. But even so, they were far higher than in other recent years.

The Transportation Department’s new strategy designed to eliminate road deaths focuses on what’s called a “safe system approach.” The idea is to recognize that drivers will make errors, but to limit the harm they cause by, for example, designing roads that encourage them to go more slowly. The approach will be boosted with funds in the infrastructure package President Joe Biden signed last year.

“People make mistakes, but human mistakes don’t always have to be lethal,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “In a well-designed system, safety measures make sure that human fallibility does not lead to human fatalities.”

The Washington Post