Summer Will Provide Big Clues About Future Direction Of U.S. Road Deaths

Some of the major causes of the 10.5% spike in U.S. traffic deaths last year persist and are growing, while others may be fading. This summer will play a crucial role in demonstrating how that mix of factors affects future trends in roadway fatalities in an American society that today is more like 2019 than 2021.

After several years of trending downward significantly — in large part due to advances in automated-safety features in vehicles such as lane-departure warnings and adaptive cruise control — the last couple of years brought a sharp reversal in a long run of annual improvements in traffic-death statistics. It was a startling reversal, really, because the long freeze in business and personal activity during the first year of the pandemic, 2021, greatly reduced the number and frequency of cars on U.S. roadways.

But Stefan Heck, CEO of Nauto, which provides an AI-run system that helps fleet drivers perform more safely, told me that the decline in traffic during the pandemic also produced a huge negative effect on fatalities.

“With fewer cars on the road, there was a big increase in speeding,” Heck said. “Speeding rarely directly causes crashes, but it does causing an increase in crash severity. Mostly what it does is increase the damage when you do hit someone.”

Another clear contributor to the dramatic recent rise in deaths is the persistent and still-spreading scourge of distracted driving. It’s still increasing despite year after year of public-service advertising campaigns and other efforts meant to get drivers to stop it.

“There’s been a continuous increase over the last seven or eight years as smartphones have penetrated more broadly into the market,” Heck said. “We’re seeing rampant distraction rates. It’s in commercial fleets and off the charts in consumer vehicles. What hasn’t appeared in government data yet is the prevalence of streaming apps and cellphone companies including free streaming with mobile-phone plans, so we’re even seeing people streaming movies while they’re driving.”

Heck said that included in the troublesome rise in traffic deaths is a marked spike in the deaths of pedestrians and bikers. “More people have shifted to scooters and bikes,” especially amid the pandemic, he said, and while European motorists are more used to sharing the roads with these vehicles, American drivers are still getting used to them.

Heck couldn’t say whether the trend toward legalization of recreational marijuana use in more states is contributing to traffic deaths as more Americans drive high. He said this isn’t showing up in fleet data but “it may be a driver” of more deaths among consumers.