Now for some better news, a spectacular chart on the long-term declining traffic fatality rate in the USA:
I found this in Critical Issues in Transportation for 2024 and Beyond1, from the National Academies Press. The underlying source is the NHTSA.
Now, I know in recent years there have reversals and counter-reversals in the long-term trend, as the pandemic cleared roads (and thus allowed higher and deadlier speeds), and as the recovery from the pandemic turned the trend back downwards. But for the purposes of this post I just wanted to show the very big picture.
Which is a picture of very bad news (a century of about 40,000 deaths per year?!?) and very good news (a death rate of only about 2 per hundred million miles of driving?!?). I’ll leave it to you to pick your optic, but IMHO it’s a mix of tragedy and victory. Millions of lives lost… but maybe billions of trips to the beach with the kids. Trade-offs, trade-offs.
Leaving that thorny dilemma aside, it’s interesting to see some changes across the century. In the 1920s the fatality rate was sky-high, for at least two reasons: cars had almost no safety equipment (believe it or not, even windshield wipers weren’t standard on US cars until about 1920), and most states didn’t even have driving tests until 1940 or so. Then we can see the drop during World War II, when car production was curtailed and gasoline rationed. The surge in the 1960s through 1980s I have not researched, but my suspicion is that in this period horsepower and speed were increasing faster than safety equipment could keep up (the first state to require the use of seatbelts was New York… and that was only in 1984!).
Before we wrap this one up, here’s a trick question: what’s the safest form of transport, in terms of fatalities per mile per unit of weight hauled? (I am mixing together here the transport of people and of goods, totaled up into one giant tonnage figure divided by one giant mileage figure.) What do you think? Airplanes? Trucks? Rail? Cars? Ships? Answer in a future post.
I read these tomes so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.