Traffic Fatalities Rising Again

Early data show there will be a “significant increase in lives lost on our roadways” in 2015, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), said at the Washington (D.C.) Auto Show.

Deaths due to car crashes had plateaued from 2009 to 2014 but statistics from January through June of last year indicate a rise in vehicle fatalities, NHTSA Administrator Mark R. Rosekind said.

Rosekind noted that new autonomous driving technology can help lower the 94 percent of traffic fatalities that are caused by human error.

He pointed to Automatic Emergency Braking Systems, blind spot elimination, and lane departure warning technology as showing great promise in lowering human-driving errors.

An estimated 16,225 persons died in motor vehicle crashes in the first six months of 2015, according to an analysis of data from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and other sources. That’s a rise of more than 8 percent from the same period in 2014.

In 2014, there were 15,014 traffic fatalities through June, and 32,675 for the year. The fewest fatalities occur in the first quarter, FARS data shows. Crash fatalities dropped about 40 percent from 1973 to 2013, but only 0.03 percent from 2009 to 2013 (See “Road Safety Hits a Plateau: Fed Traffic Stats“).

Driver education on using seatbelts and distracted driving is especially needed for the young, said Rosekind.

SURVIVE THE DRIVE

The new book ‘Survive the Drive’ by two researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute is designed to educate new drivers and their families on driving risks and ways to avoid them.

Authors Thomas A. Dingus, VTTI director, and Mindy Buchanan-King, communications director, note that driving has a fatality rate of 15.2 per 100,000 participants. That’s higher than white water rafting, boating, scuba diving, and other popular sports.  

Teens especially are in danger while driving distracted. For instance, teens that drive and text have a 10 times higher chance of crashing than an adult, according to the Survive the Drive’s analysis of VTTI naturalistic driving studies.

While it’s true that autonomous technology will help lower accidents, it will take about 25 years for today’s cars to be replaced with vehicles with the safer features. That’s because owners hold on to their vehicles for so long, according to the book.

Rosekind announced at the auto show that the Department of Transportation had launched the ‘Safe Cars Save Lives’ public awareness campaign to urge vehicle owners to check for open recalls at least twice a year.  Vehicle owners can search for their Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) on NHTSA’s database to find if it is part of an open recall.

There were nearly 900 recalls affecting 51 million vehicles in 2015.