A recent edition of the online Morning Brew cited a government report last week that 31,720 people had been killed in motor vehicle crashes in the first nine months of 2021.
That is the highest nine-month total in 15 years. It’s also 12 percent higher than the same time frame in 2020, making it the biggest percentage increase over a nine-month period since records began in 1975.
One might think the spike over 2020 might be due to lower numbers of traffic deaths in 2020 when Covid kept us home and off the road.
Well, think again. U.S. traffic fatalities that year jumped to their highest levels since 2007 even though vehicle miles driven in 2020 dropped by 13 percent.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) suggests more reckless driving since the pandemic began, including drivers not wearing seatbelts and blowing through speed limits.
I’ll add a couple of my own: cell phones, drunk drivers, young drivers, old drivers, foreign drivers, congested dash boards, road rage and just poor driving habits.
However, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg calls the rise in traffic deaths a “national crisis” and thinks blaming the human drivers won’t solve anything.
All I can say is, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
According to our Secretary of Transportation, the way to bring down traffic deaths is to redesign roads to be safer, boosting safety standards for vehicles, and incorporating technology like automated braking into vehicles.
What good are safety standards if you mandate seatbelts and humans don’t wear them, you require blinkers and humans don’t use them, you mandate cruise control and humans don’t use it and blow past the speed limit.
You have laws against drinking and driving and humans still do it, you have hands-free cell phone laws and humans still drive with one hand on the wheel and one holding the phone to their ear.
Before we start redesigning roads, how about we fix the one we have?