America’s traffic fatality rate is the highest in the industrialized world. What makes our roads so unsafe?
How dangerous are U.S. roads?
Motor vehicle crashes are now the second-leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., behind only drug overdoses. While roadway fatalities began dropping steadily in the 1980s — thanks to more seat-belt usage, airbags, and safer car frames — that progress stalled in the 2010s and sharply reversed during the pandemic. In 2021, the number of crashes spiked 16 percent year over year to more than 6 million; the auto-related death toll hit 42,915, a 16-year high. Fatalities have since dropped slightly, to an estimated 40,000 last year, but that’s still 10 percent above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, in most other wealthy countries auto-related deaths have continued their long-term decline. France, Australia, Japan, Germany, and the U.K. each had fewer than five road accident deaths per 100,000 residents in 2022; in the U.S., it was 13 per 100,000. One of those killed was U.S. diplomat Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, hit by a truck while biking in Bethesda, Md. "It’s infuriating," said her husband and fellow diplomat Dan Langenkamp, "to be a person that goes around the world bragging about our record, trying to get people to think like us — to know that we are such failures on this issue."
What’s behind the higher death toll?
Some researchers point the finger at Americans’ appetite for ever-larger autos. Drivers have largely abandoned sedans and shifted to SUVs and pickup trucks, which constitute 80 percent of new-auto sales. Pickup trucks have added about 1,300 pounds in curb weight since 1990, while a typical full-size SUV now clocks in at around 5,000 pounds — 25 percent heavier than a midcentury sedan. That extra weight makes the vehicles more destructive in a crash, while their blunt, tall hoods reduce driver visibility and mean pedestrians are more likely to suffer deadly blows to their head and torso, rather than legs, in the event of a collision. A recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that SUVs and vans with a hood height above 40 inches, standard for a new American truck, are 45 percent more likely to kill a pedestrian than a shorter vehicle. Notably, pedestrian deaths have climbed along with the popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, surging 80 percent since 2009. That’s about 3,300 more deaths a year. Still, some researchers doubt that the "truckification" of the family car fully explains America’s outsize vehicular death toll.
Why are they skeptical?
They note that larger new vehicles have replaced older, smaller ones on the road at a relatively slow rate. The change in vehicle types is not responsible for "a huge portion" of the spike in pedestrian deaths, perhaps for only 100 extra fatalities a year over the past decade, said Justin Tyndall of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. And curiously, while ownership of sedans, coupes, and other smaller cars has dropped since 2009, pedestrian deaths from those vehicles have increased by more than 70 percent. That suggests factors other than vehicle size are at play.
What else could be to blame?
Possibly our addiction to smartphones. The devices, which can distract both drivers and pedestrians, have gone from novelty to ubiquitous over the past 15 years. Of course, smartphones are widely used in every country. But almost all U.S. cars have an automatic transmission — in contrast, some 75 percent in Europe are stick shift — which means American drivers are more likely than their European counterparts to have a hand free to send text messages and check social media, and to take their eyes off the road. Data gathered by U.S. firm Cambridge Mobile Telematics shows that Americans spend nearly three times as much time interacting with their phones while driving than people in Britain. Yet that doesn’t explain why crashes and deaths spiked so high during the pandemic.
What changed during Covid?
When streets emptied early in the pandemic, drivers grew more reckless. That dangerous behavior seems to have lingered. Speeding was involved in a quarter of all fatal crashes in 2020 and 2021. A federal study also found 65 percent of people involved in serious or fatal road accidents in those years tested positive for at least one drug — up from about 50 percent pre-pandemic. And while data on this is sparse, pandemic-era stresses may also have fueled a nationwide epidemic of tailgating, illegal passing, and aggressive driving. "If I were to set out to create a situation that would make the most people act badly and angrily," said psychologist Ryan Martin. "I couldn’t come up with anything better than driving."
Would a crackdown on bad driving cut deaths?
Human error is the "critical reason" for 94 percent of crashes, according to a 2015 Department of Transportation report. But some researchers argue that faulting only individuals for America’s traffic deaths lets car and road designers off the hook. In mid-20th-century America, urban planners introduced car-friendly, multilane arterial roads — often without sidewalks or crosswalks — to prioritize fast, free-flowing traffic. More than 60 percent of pedestrian deaths now occur on roads that are designed like highways but are lined with stores, businesses, and increasingly homes. Among states with the highest pedestrian death rates, most are in the Sun Belt, which has a rising population and a lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. America’s world-leading traffic death rate is "not a reflection of geography or culture," said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, but of "policy decisions that elevated fast car travel and automaker profits over roadway safety."
Vision not quite zero
In 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted an ambitious plan to eliminate all road deaths and severe injuries. Since then, hundreds of regions and cities around the world — as well as a handful of countries — have committed to "Vision Zero," aiming to curb accidents through lower speed limits and traffic-calming measures such as narrowed roadways, reduced street parking, and more medians and bike lanes. Oslo and Helsinki, both Vision Zero adopters, recorded zero pedestrian deaths in 2019. There have been fewer successes in the U.S. New York recorded 257 traffic deaths last year, just one fewer than in 2014, when it became America’s first Vision Zero city. Los Angeles, which took the pledge a year later, has seen its deaths nearly double to 336. Some problems are beyond cities’ control: Cars are wider in the U.S. than in Europe, which can make smaller lanes impractical. But there are local obstacles, too, including thickets of planning regulations and residents who don’t want street parking to be sacrificed for new bike or bus lanes. "We’re up against 60 years of autocentric design," said Los Angeles transportation official Seleta Reynolds.
