Car crash fatalities...and the pandemic?
Alright, let’s keep the momentum going on this series I shall call: "10 leading causes of death during the pandemic: What changed (and didn’t change)”
Up next, car crashes.
Car crashes are lumped under a large umbrella of “unintentional injuries”. Overall, unintentional injuries was the 4th leading cause of death in 2020. However, unintentional injury is the leading cause of death from ages 1 to 44. And among the many things categorized as unintentional injury (drowning, poisoning), the major cause of unintentional injury from ages 5 to 24 is motor vehicle traffic. As bad as COVID has been, traffic crashes still kill vastly more young people.
Impact of the pandemic on car crash fatalities
As has been reported pretty widely (such as here, here and here), traffic fatalities actually did NOT go down during the pandemic. They in fact rose, despite the fact that people drove less miles. This means that not only did fatalities rise, but fatality rates, crashes per mile, rose substantially.
Between March 2020- January 2021, there have been 67 studies published on this topic (which I sprinkle throughout this post). Anecdotally, we have seen some jarring numbers…
Minnesota: March 16th to April 7 reported 24 total crashes, but 28 deaths. Last year in same range 12 crashes 13 deaths
Massachusetts: Collisions are down 73%, compared to 2019. However crash deaths are only down 38%.
Austin: 450 reported crashes with 99 reported injuries in all of 2019. 381 crashes with 111 injuries in 6 weeks of the pandemic
Why increased fatalities?
Several reasons.
Less cars = more speeding. A comprehensive report in the UK found that traffic flows in the post-lockdown period reduced by 64%, with the biggest declines recorded on roads with speed limits above 50mph. High-end speeding was much more of a problem on 60 mph roads, with vast increases in the proportion of drivers travelling more than 15mph above the limit.
We also saw this using from camera-issued speeding ticket data in NYC.
In some places (and mainly outside of the United States), people resorted to driving instead of public transportation. This put them at higher risk for a vehicle fatality too.
One study found that even though there were reduced traffic volumes due to lockdown, this led to a slight increase in speeds (6–11%), more frequent harsh acceleration and harsh braking events (up to 12% increase) as well mobile phone use (up to 42% increase) during March and April 2020.
This is bad news in many ways.
Most importantly, these are preventable deaths. We know how to make it better (driver assistance systems, design of infrastructure, reducing speeding), we just chose not to.
The increases in speeds that we have seen in the past year due to lower traffic volumes will likely continue to a certain extent as more people work from home even after COVID ends. This means that the rise in fatalities from traffic crashes will likely continue.
Love, YLE, Dr. Kari Watkins, and (soon to be Dr.) Kevin Rix
Dr. Kari Watkins is an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She’s a fellow YLE follower who advocated for this post and helped me late last night craft it. Also, my PhD student (and soon to be Dr.) Kevin Rix, an expert in unintentional injuries, pulled some fascinating statistics and figures.