Has Progress on Travel Safety Run Off the Road?

On Wednesday, January 29th, the United States suffered its most significant commercial airline accident in over a dozen years. Extensive media coverage quickly followed. The involvement of a military helicopter and the proximity, approximately three miles from the White House and the U.S. Capitol, added to the attention. The U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary, having just been sworn in hours earlier, arrived at the scene and shared sympathies, grief, and a commitment to make changes.

Within hours, there was confirmation of 67 fatalities and a list of potential contributory factors and speculation on strategies for change. Cable, network, and print media provided extensive coverage, including emotional stories of the lives impacted by the tragedy. Within hours, there was talk of changing protocols for helicopter training routines, questions about the air traffic control system, concerns about air congestion at the busy Reagan National Airport, questions about communication protocols and equipment, and a host of other considerations awaiting a comprehensive analysis by the safety team. Over the next days, months, and years, there will inevitably be a multitude of changes, several whose need has long been recognized, motivated by this high-profile incident.

Before the media briefings were over on January 30th, more people were likely to have died in automobile crashes since the prior day’s 9:00 PM aircraft crash – but that didn't get national attention or calls for action. On average, approximately 110 people die in roadway crashes in the United States each day, totaling approximately 40,000 per year — the equivalent of literally hundreds of commercial aircraft crashes. Airline travel is dramatically safer than roadway travel. For example, a five-mile trip to the airport in a personal vehicle has more than twice the fatality risk as does a 2000-mile airline flight. The best way to stay safe when traveling by air is to make sure you have safe travel to and from the airport.

Factors in road safety

It's not that roadway safety doesn't get attention at all. It's been acknowledged as a high priority at virtually every level of government for every administration. The new Secretary of Transportation spoke passionately about travel safety at his Senatorial hearings, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s inaugural meeting for this session of Congress focused extensively on safety. Multitudes of programs at the local, state, and national levels address safety. But progress has been excruciatingly slow. Fatality rates per person-mile of travel remained relatively stable from 2010 through 2019 before spiking up during COVID.  They have yet to return to prior levels.

As is the case with airline accidents, many factors contribute to roadway vehicle crashes. The roadway infrastructure, the vehicle, the weather and climatic conditions, the driver, and emergency response all play a role. 

Exploring solutions benefits from ever-increasing data available to understand crashes and fatalities. Some insights into safety strategies can be gleaned from both cursory and in-depth exploration of safety data.  

• Over 30 percent of roadway fatalities are estimated to involve alcohol consumption; four out of five of those are male drivers and two-thirds had alcohol levels of 0.15 percent, well over the comparatively high U.S. normal level of 0.08. Over 40 percent of fatalities are not just the impaired driver but are passengers in the driver’s and other involved vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, and other people outside vehicles. (Source)
• 28.6 percent of fatalities in 2022 were speed-related. (Source)
• Distracted driving, obviously difficult to discern, is estimated to be contributory to 14 percent of fatalities. (Source)

What actions are governments taking?

A great deal of initiatives to improve safety have focused on efforts to improve the physical environment and the vehicle characteristics. These are meritorious issues that focus on tangible and implementable solutions that can reduce the severity of crashes and accordingly reduce fatalities. On the vehicle side, key initiatives such as seatbelts, air bags, anti-lock braking systems, and structural improvements have had meaningful impacts. Infrastructure improvements include everything from signage and markings to pavement conditions, to roadside design elements and configuration of intersections and road alignments. 

But there are constraints to how rapidly these types of changes can produce measurable and meaningful safety improvements. Roadway system elements have lives and maintenance/rebuilding cycles of 10 to 50 or more years, thus taking decades and ultimately costing hundreds of billions to implement systemic changes. Vehicle safety improvements are similarly long-term solutions. The average vehicle is over 12 years of age and studies suggest that the average vehicle has an operating life of 15 to 17 years before scrapping. Thus, deploying improved safety features is a multi-decade process to reach meaningful market penetration.  

While progress is being made on some fronts, new challenges confront road safety efforts. The emergence and proliferation of cell phones has exacerbated distracted driving, as has the increasing prevalence of information and entertainment systems in vehicles. Growth in micromobility options like scooters and e-bikes, as well as additional pedestrian traffic, also exacerbate safety risks. Preferences for larger vehicles is increasing the severity of vehicle-pedestrian crashes, while rapid acceleration and the increased weight of electric vehicles may be contributing to crash frequency and severity. Increased traffic in and of itself increases the probability of crashes, as a vehicle weaving out of its lane or running through an intersection is increasingly likely to impact another vehicle as volumes increase.

Shaping driver behavior

Safety initiatives that attempt to shape drivers’ behaviors that contribute to accidents have been less aggressive. A colleague protests that these should be labeled as misbehaviors and not accidents, as the data suggest huge numbers of fatalities are associated with driver misbehaviors. Perhaps that is why safety professionals use the terminology crashes and not accidents. 

There are certainly rules influencing behaviors — for example, cell phone and seat belt use — but compliance and enforcement aren't sufficient to keep these factors from being significant contributors to crash fatalities. Americans have shown reluctance to be more aggressive in initiatives to influence driver behavior. There are no national statistics on the magnitude of enforcement initiatives. The COVID pandemic exposure risk concerns coupled with sensitivities about safety risks and fear of charges of bias in enforcing traffic violations have dampened enthusiasm for roadway enforcement. In a broader sense, Americans have been reluctant to exercise stricter enforcement. We have been extraordinarily tolerant of what should be intolerable levels of DUI fatalities. In spite of frequent reporting of DUI-caused fatalities with a high preponderance of multiple repeated offenses by the driver, there seems to be a reluctance to get stricter. American standards for DUI levels are less rigorous than in most of the rest of the world.  

People have attempted to use technologies to both enforce and protect against driver misbehaviors with modest success. Ultimately, automated vehicles may resolve some of the challenges of driver misbehavior, but the time frame for full deployment is inevitably decades away. In the interim, technology can be used more for enforcement, but even that has run into roadblocks in many areas. Red light cameras, for example, offered an opportunity to discipline driver behavior but spurred a rebellion when they appeared to be motivated more by opportunities to generate revenues for vendors and governments than to influence driver behaviors. Camera monitoring for enforcement of driver behaviors can reduce the risks of bias and be safer for law enforcement and travelers, but have run into push-back associated with or rationalized by concerns for personal privacy, due process, or cost.  

The lack of will or ability to enforce extends to the area of vehicle insurance. Approximately 14 percent of drivers are uninsured. This number varies markedly across states, from a low of 5.9 percent in Wyoming to a high of 25.2 percent in the District of Columbia (Source). The lack of enforcement not only burdens insured drivers with the costs from uninsured drivers, but it may also be contributing to more high-risk travelers on the road who contribute to hit-and-run accidents. In 2022 alone, there were approximately 2,932 hit-and-run fatalities in the U.S., accounting for about 6.8 percent of all fatal crashes that year (Source). In Florida, estimates indicate that an astounding 25 percent of all vehicle accidents are hit-and-runs (Source).

And do we have enough discipline regarding driver training and licensing? During COVID, it was not uncommon to hear stories of foregone driver road tests and abbreviated testing. Fewer students are getting driver training in school and 20 states plus the District of Columbia are offering some form of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants (Source). One wonders if drivers have the driving practice, skills, knowledge, and English comprehension regarding safety rules to be safe drivers.

Enforcement and education: a quick fix?

Road safety remains a broadly held bipartisan goal. Professionals have gathered and analyzed massive amounts of information to understand safety and the often-complex set of circumstances that contribute to fatalities. Much has been studied and written about strategies for addressing the road safety challenge (Learn more). Initiatives to enhance facilities and vehicles have been and continue to be underway. But progress has been slow, and we still haven’t recovered from the uptick in fatalities during COVID.  

The emotional and financial consequences of travel fatalities go well beyond the driver who misbehaves. The consequences ripple across families and society. We face the classic challenge of weighing individual freedoms against the public interest. Unless we are willing to wait decades for vehicle automation to reduce driver and road users’ misbehavior, and/or we are willing to invest billions and decades to redesign and rebuild our travel infrastructure to attempt to minimize the safety consequences of misbehavior, more needs to be done to ensure safer driver behavior. If we hope to have meaningful progress in the near term, we need to lose our tolerance of driver misbehavior. 

Dr. Steven Polzin is a Research Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University focusing on travel behavior and transportation policy.   Prior engagements include serving as a Senior Advisor for Research and Technology at USDOT, as Director of Mobility Policy Research at the Center for Urban Transportation Research, University of South Florida, and working for transit agencies in Dallas, Cleveland, and Chicago.