A rare spot of good news today: For the second year in a row, US roads got a little safer.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published its early estimate of road deaths in 2024; 39,345 people lost their lives, which is a 3.8 percent decrease from the 40,901 deaths that occurred on US roads in 2023.The problem started with the pandemic; although road traffic dried up, the death rate leapt by 20 percent.There's no single cause, and studies have identified multiple contributing factors: empty roads designed to practically encourage speeding, little to no enforcement of traffic laws by the police, a general sense of fatalism in the face of public health restrictions that few Americans had ever contemplated in recent times, and car companies making big trucks and SUVs with high hoods, which are much more deadly to pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in a crash.2024 also saw a decrease in total road deaths, which fell by 4.3 percent to 40,901, down from 42,721 in 2022.
NHTSA has completed its final analysis of fatal crashes in 2023 and says that the rate of deaths fell by 6 percent, to 1.26 per 100 million miles traveled.
Preliminary analysis for 2024 shows a further drop to 1.2 deaths per 100 million miles.As ever, though, the gains are far from uniform, and a handful of states continue to account for an oversized share of the carnage.
Fourteen states plus the District of Columbia saw road deaths increase in 2024, sometimes despite flashy "Vision Zero" initiatives from local governments meant to reduce the number of crashes down to nothing.Before we get too smug, though, it's sobering to note that 2019 was one of the safest years for driving in the US, and we have a long way to go to get back to those levels.