Tag Archives: drivers

American drivers cause many accidents and deaths

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Americans like to drive. And American drivers contribute to a lot of accidents and deaths:

Photo by Taras Makarenko on Pexels.com

Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious.”

In 2020 and 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has calculated, approximately a quarter of all fatal wrecks in the United States involved vehicles traveling above the posted speed limit; a significant percentage of the dead, whether passenger or driver, were not wearing seatbelts. In line with the trends documented by Kuhls in Nevada — and observed firsthand by Brown in Michigan — national intoxicated-driving rates have surged to the extent that one in every 10 arrests is now linked to a suspected D.U.I. And aggressive driving, defined by AAA as “tailgating, erratic lane changing or illegal passing,” factors into 56 percent of crashes resulting in a fatality. (Distressingly, this statistic does not cover the tens of thousands of people injured, often critically, by aggressive drivers, or the 550 people shot annually after or during road-rage incidents — or the growing number of pedestrians and cyclists deliberately targeted by incensed motorists.)

Take the bad behavior and add the perils of distraction by smartphone — responsible, by one conservative estimate, for about 3,500 deaths annually — and you’re left with what Emily Schweninger, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation, described to me as a “genuine public-health crisis” on the level of cancer, suicide and heart disease.

Much could change in the coming years to address this issue. Safety features in vehicles. Changed designs of roadways and spaces for pedestrians and bicyclists. Other efforts need more time and capabilities: self-driving vehicles, a changed culture around roads, driving, and community life.

But, part of the issue is whether these accidents and deaths are a problem or not. Americans like to complain about other drivers and tend to see their own driving as okay. Driving is required in many places. Some drivers might even enjoy driving. The delivery of many of our goods requires driving. Are deaths via vehicle just the price Americans are willing to pay for driving?

Addressing this issue is a long-term project. All of daily life contains some risks but Americans tend to not think much about the risks of driving even as it impacts many lives on a daily basis. Does this mean a national safety campaign is needed? A serious conversation about how necessary driving should be? A need to invest in new technologies and options? On one hand, plenty of people would have experience with this issue. On the other hand, it will take a lot of work to convince people to support significant changes to American driving and all that goes with it.

The most common job in 37 states

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Moving goods around the country requires a number of drivers:

More than 3 million people drive trucks in the United States. In fact, according to Steve Viscelli, author of “The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream” and a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, it’s the No. 1 occupation in 37 of 50 states.

Americans don’t generally pay much attention to infrastructure but the trucking industry may be lower than average on the list of infrastructure components. Outside of complaining about large trucks on the road (driving next to them, the noise they generate), it is difficult to remember that so much of what we purchase comes at least part of the way through trucks. And if trucking all moves to self-driving vehicles, perhaps trucking will become even more faceless.

But, perhaps one way we will hear about the future changes in trucking: a significant loss in jobs. Will drivers be able to transition to new jobs better than millions of manufacturing workers or others who have lost jobs because of a changing economy in recent decades?

Fatalities due to vehicle-train collisions down dramatically

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As the Chicago Tribune recently remembered a train-school bus collision that killed 7 in 1995, I looked at the statistics on vehicle-train crash fatalities. The numbers have dropped quite a bit in recent decades:

All Highway-Rail Incidents at Public and Private Crossings, 1981-2014
Source: Federal Railroad Administration
Year Collisions Fatalities Injuries
1981 9,461 728 3,293
1982 7,932 607 2,637
1983 7,305 575 2,623
1984 7,456 649 2,910
1985 7,073 582 2,687
1986 6,513 616 2,458
1987 6,426 624 2,429
1988 6,617 689 2,589
1989 6,526 801 2,868
1990 5,715 698 2,407
1991 5,388 608 2,094
1992 4,910 579 1,975
1993 4,892 626 1,837
1994 4,979 615 1,961
1995 4,633 579 1,894
1996 4,257 488 1,610
1997 3,865 461 1,540
1998 3,508 431 1,303
1999 3,489 402 1,396
2000 3,502 425 1,219
2001 3,237 421 1,157
2002 3,077 357 999
2003 2,977 334 1,035
2004 3,077 372 1,092
2005 3,057 359 1,051
2006 2,936 369 1,070
2007 2,776 339 1,062
2008 2,429 290 992
2009 1,934 249 743
2010 2,051 260 887
2011 2,061 250 1,045
2012 1,985 230 975
2013* 2,098 232 972
2014* 2,287 269 849

* Preliminary statistics

Based on the number of articles I’ve read plus personal experience driving at-grade crossings in the Chicago area (which has many cars driving over railroads tracks each day – in 2014, Illinois had the second most train-vehicle collisions in the country), there are several factors behind this decrease:

  1. Improved signage at many at-grade crossings.
  2. More barriers at crossings that make it difficult to go around gates (longer gate arms) or cross into other lanes (barriers in the middle of the road).
  3. Eliminating at-grade crossings with more underpasses and bridges. These can be expensive but they reduce crashes as well as save time for drivers who don’t have to wait for trains to pass.

Yet, these changes can’t control the actions of drivers as the Chicago Tribune article noted:

But experts say safety is a matter of attitude and awareness, not just signals and signs. That’s the message of groups like Operation Lifesaver and the DuPage Railroad Safety Council, an organization founded by Dr. Lanny Wilson after the death of his daughter at a rail crossing in 1994.

A 2013 University of Illinois at Chicago study found that as many as 4 in 10 Chicago-area pedestrians and bicyclists said they were at times willing to ignore flashing lights, ringing bells and gates at railroad crossings…

Barkan pointed to the Feb. 3 incident in Valhalla, N.Y., when a Metro-North Railroad commuter train struck an SUV at a grade crossing, killing six…

That crash could have been avoided, he said, if the driver had observed the “cardinal rule” of grade crossing safety: “Motorists must never enter a grade crossing until they have a clear exit path that equals or exceeds the length of their vehicle available on the other side of the tracks.”

Reaching zero traffic deaths on the roads also involves continuous improvement at such crossings.

Building intricate intersections to help drivers avoid accidents

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Here is a quick look at some “intricate” intersection designs that are intended to help drivers avoid accidents. These go beyond the “Michigan Left” to the “Jughandle,” the “Superstreet,” and the “Diverging Diamond.”

Here is a little explanation of the difficulty these intersections face:

As you can imagine, these designs are not an easy sell. “It’s a two-fold sale that has to happen,” Sangster tells us. “We’re not going to build these if they’re not safe. We’re also not going to build them if they don’t work better.”

I wonder if the better question is how drivers would react to them. People tend not to like change in their predictable roads. Of course, with repeated exposure people will get better at handling these kinds of intersections and eventually they become normal. (Having some extended experience with the Michigan Left as well as a roundabout, I can attest that they seem strange at first but become second nature pretty quickly.) I could even imagine a situation where a local community comes to regard their “intricate” intersection as a badge of honor, particularly if the intersection is much safer.

There are also cost and construction concerns with these new intersections. Check out an article about a 2010 proposal for a diverging diamond to be installed at Route 59 and I-88 in Naperville that suggests American engineers have been reluctant to be some of the first to spend the money for such intersections.

A new traffic control device: painting a picture of a child on the road

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The battle to control speeders has a new weapon:

On Tuesday, the town [West Vancouver, Canada] unveiled a new way to persuade motorists to ease off the gas pedal in the vicinity of the École Pauline Johnson Elementary School: a 2-D image of a child playing, creating the illusion that the approaching driver will soon blast into a child.

According to Discover magazine, the pavement painting appears to rise up as the driver gets closer to it, reaching full 3-D realism at around 100 feet: “Its designers created the image to give drivers who travel at the street’s recommended 18 miles per hour (30 km per hour) enough time to stop before hitting Pavement Patty — acknowledging the spectacle before they continue to safely roll over her.”

I would be very curious to know how effective this is. While the article suggests that drivers may then be more prone to hit real children, drivers might also just eventually tune out the painting, much as they do with traffic signs.

Another school of thought would suggest measures like this painting are missing the point. What really should change are the structure and design of streets. If you want people to drive more safely, make roads narrower and include parked cars on both sides. Or, one could go as far as European traffic engineer Hans Monderman who advocated removing all traffic signs – since drivers ignore them much of the time anyway, having no signs might force them to pay more attention.