Tag Archives: highway safety

“Last year was the deadliest for pedestrians since 1990,” reports Governing magazine. Maybe; maybe not — the data for the entire year haven’t yet been published. Instead, it appears various interest groups are trying to gain publicity by being the first to report roadway safety news.

In this case, it is the Governors Highway Safety Association (which is really an association of state traffic safety agencies), which just issued a Pedestrian Traffic Safety Report. A couple of weeks ago it was the National Safety Council, which reported that 40,000 people were killed on roadways in 2018 for the third year in a row.

In fact, none of the 2018 numbers are certain because they are based on only the first six months of the year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which keeps the “official” data, probably won’t release final 2018 numbers until October. At least, that’s when it released 2017 numbers. It also released “preliminary” numbers for the first half of 2018 at about the same time. Continue reading →

Motor vehicle fatalities declined slightly in 2017, says a new release from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Where 37,461 people were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, the number fell to 37,150 in 2017 — not a big decrease, but it is going in the right direction. Since miles of driving grew by 1.2 percent, the fatality rate per billion miles declined even more.

NHTSA doesn’t have the data broken down by kinds of accidents yet, but that didn’t stop the Detroit Free Press from simultaneously publishing a scare-piece claiming that “pedestrian fatalities skyrocket in U.S.” I’m not sure what the news is in this article since it is based on data reported here a full seven months ago.

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Comments on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration‘s proposed vehicle-to-vehicle communications mandate are due one week from today on April 12. If approved, this will be one of the most expensive vehicle safety rules ever, adding around $300 dollars to the price of every car, or (at recent car sales rates) well over $5 billion per year.

Despite the high cost, the NHTSA predicts the rule will save only about 25 to 31 lives in 2025, mainly because it will do no good until most cars have it. Yet even by 2060, when virtually all cars would have it, NHTSA predicts it will save only about 1,000 to 1,365 lives per year.

The real danger is not that it will cost too much per life saved but that mandating one technology will inhibit the development and use of better technologies that could save even more lives at a lower cost. The technology the NHTSA wants to mandate is known as dedicated short-range communications, a form of radio. Yet advancements in cell phones, wifi, and other technologies could do the same thing better for less money.

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Good news: The United States had 56,000 structurally deficient bridges in 2016. That’s good news because the number in 2015 was nearly 59,000. In fact, the number has declined in every year since 1992 (the earliest year for which records are available), when it was 124,000.

The American Road and Transportation Builders thinks 2016’s number is a good reason to jump on the trillion-dollar infrastructure bandwagon in the hope that federal funds will be available to enrich its members. But this is a problem that is solving itself without any new federal programs.

The bad news is that highway fatalities in 2016 grew to more than 40,000, at least as reckoned by the National Safety Council. NSC’s numbers are about 7.5 percent higher than the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s because the latter only counts deaths that take place immediately after accidents, but still this is a cause for alarm because as it indicates a 15 percent since 2011, or about 5,000 people a year.

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