Traffic Advisory
A number of readers (one is always heartened to discover they exist!) have written in to ask about the ongoing state of this blog, which has admittedly declined in frequency as of late. I am still here, I assure you, but there are several things at work here: 1.) I’ve shifted most of the micro-announcement, interesting-links sort material to Twitter (follow here); my column at Slate.com, meanwhile, covers some of the longer-form material that may otherwise have been treated here. 2.) I’ve had a large number of magazine and other journalistic assignments, some having nothing at all to do with driving or transport, and in the economy of words, paying work must always trump non-paying (and trust me, if this blog was a paying gig there’d be no problem filling it seven days a week with material). And, 3.) I’ve been traveling a lot, for work and for pleasure.
I’ve just in fact returned from Lisbon to find a new paper from Michael Sivak in my inbox (”Toward Understanding the Recent Large Reductions in U.S. Road Fatalities,” in Traffic Injury Prevention), the third of a trilogy of works examining the recent drop in U.S. traffic fatalities; this paper uses the most updated data available, from 2008. As he notes:
From 1994 to 2005, U.S. road fatalities increased by 7 percent, from 40,716 to 43,510. However, from 2005 to 2009, they dropped by 22 percent, to 33,963 in 2009 (see Figure 1). A reduction of such magnitude over such a short time has not occurred since road safety statistics were first kept (starting in 1913), except for the reductions during World War II (National Safety Council 2009).
He essentially finds the decline is greater than might be expected were we simply to factor in the state of the economy over the past few years, and the chart below summarizes where injuries have gone up and where they have gone down in a number of significant categories. There’s other intriguing details — like the decline in repeat DWI crashes, or the downtick in station-wagon crashes — but I’ll leave those for you to sift through.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Drivers, Roads, Traffic safety, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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December 2nd, 2010 at 7:40 pm
I’ve noticed in Arizona, over the past 10 years crashes (all crashes) had peaked in 2006 and since then dropped dramatically — like the national data, even more sharply.
BUT the bicyclist crashes (my area of interest) have not dropped, they’ve been more or less static. I wonder if the “Local roads Up” noted by Sivak is portending more crashes for bicyclists?
http://azbikelaw.org/blog/manner-and-fault-in-bicyclist-traffic-fatalities-arizona-2009/
see Table 1 in the paper.
December 2nd, 2010 at 9:01 pm
The paper is here:
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71390/1/102304.pdf
It should be noted that while deaths are way down, it is just just because of less driving, as deaths/mile are also down.
Almost of all of this, except the pedestrians, may well just be explained by the fact that cars are much safer, with airbags and better crumple zones, and collision avoidance systems.
December 3rd, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Brad: thanks! i was just going to looking for it….
Another thing i wonder about, in terms of explanations (like you mention airbags, etc) — where does improved trauma care fit in? It seems to me that it has probably improved dramatically since 1994; yet i’ve not seen that posited as an explanation for decrease in fatalities.
December 3rd, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Improved trauma care is the reason why the UK has switched from fatalities to fatalities/serious injuries, because the level of injury that would have been fatal after a few days of victim suffering is now survivable, and usually without serious impairment after recovery. The most significant thing is what used to be non-survivable head trauma can now be treated with minimal loss of brain function. The victim usually can’t hold a job because of the level of impairment, but otherwise functions normally in society.