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U.S. roads became significantly more deadly in 2020, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Although figures will not be available for an entire year, the NHTSA is calculating the death toll on our roads for the first nine months of 2020, and the news is grim. Between early January and late September last year, 28,190 people died in accidents, an increase of 4.6 percent – or 1,249 more deaths – over the same nine months in 2019. (The full statistics for 2020 will not be available until later this year.)
What makes this increase even worse news is the fact that 2019 is actually a decrease in road deaths, which decreased by two percent compared to 2018. In fact, when the NHTSA released the 2019 statistics at the end of December last year, it included a preliminary analysis of the first half of 2020 and found that during the six months the traffic volume decreased by 16 percent, and road deaths decreased by 3.3 percent during the same period.
(As the decrease in the kilometers traveled was greater than the decrease in deaths, the death rate per 100 million kilometers traveled actually increased from 1.06 to 1.25 compared to 1H 2019 and 1H 2020.)
Things got much, much worse during the months between July and September, with deaths rising by 13.3 percent. The primary culprit? Learn roads that encourage drivers to drive. During 2020, several states reported large increases in speed tickets, especially those issued to drivers who are 40 km / h or more above the speed limit. To make matters worse, it appears that more drivers who collide, with drugs or alcohol are found in their system, and fewer wore seat belts.
Across the country, hospitals are thriving under the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, with full intensive care units and no free capacity to deal with people who drove too fast and then crashed. Just because the roads are empty is not your private racetrack – slow and sensible, because if you get into an accident, you may find that the hospital can not save your life.