Roads emptied by pandemic might spur faster but deadlier driving
Robert Wunderlich, director of the Center for Transportation Safety at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, was stunned by a late October drive in the morning rush hour along Dallas’ notoriously congested North Central Expressway.
“I was driving 70 miles an hour. I was on cruise control!” said Wunderlich, in his amazed engineer voice.
This got him thinking about how our driving habits have changed in the grip of COVID-19 and how that might affect our driving during the holidays.
First, some counterintuitive news from the Texas Department of Transportation. From April 4 to April 10, during the height of stayat-home orders, traffic across the state was down a staggering 44 percent over a pre-pandemic week, Feb. 22-28. (San Antonio, incidentally, had the largest decline, some 50 percent.)
But while urban multivehicle crashes decreased about 56 percent in April when compared with the three previous Aprils, fatal wrecks decreased by only about 15 percent — and even increased in some cities. The proportion of all crashes that were fatal doubled statewide, Wunderlich added.
“That really leaped out at us,” he said.
The anecdotal but perfectly logical explanation, TxDOT traffic engineers say, appears to be that with fewer drivers on the road, especially during peak hours, people are able to drive the full speed limit and, yes, even speed dangerously.
Those stats should offer a cautionary note during the holiday season as you cruise to and from grandmother’s house, Wunderlich suggested. An average of 10 people die every day on Texas roads, which has added up to more than 70,000 over the past 20 years.
Traffic researchers across the country agree that speed is the single biggest factor in auto deaths. Wunderlich said the difference between 35-40 mph and 60-65 mph collisions on a typical Texas freeway brings about almost a three
fold increase in fatalities.
“It’s just physics and the dissipation of energy and what that does to the human brain in a crash. People have simply got to slow down,” he said. “People should enjoy the journey more and not try to arrive five to 10 minutes earlier.”
TxDOT data shows 177 people died in auto crashes in Bexar County in 2019. And in that year, the two most common contributing factors in all crashes in TxDOT’s 12-county San Antonio district were “driver inattention” and the influence of alcohol.
Statewide, the deadliest time to drive in 2019 was on a Saturday between 9 and10 p.m. The safest was Tuesday at 9 a.m.
After three years of declining auto deaths in Texas, there’s been an uptick in fatalities during 2020, said Michael Lee, TxDOT’s director of engineering and safety operations.
“Everyone (around the nation) seems to be experiencing it,” said Lee, who has worked closely with Wunderlich on how to curb fatal crashes.
While the enormous state agency must be cost-conscious, Lee said, the culture is changing within TxDOT about the wisdom of baking in multiple and sometimes expensive safety features into every road project.
For example, while it may be safer to turn every two-lane road in Texas into a four-lane divided highway, the cost would be prohibitive and the need, based on usage, unjustified.
The solution, and a nice bit of marketing alliteration, has been the three E’s of traffic safety: education, enforcement and engineering.
Education would come in the form of, say, TxDOT’s 18-year-old “Click It or Ticket” seat belt campaign, which the agency believes has helped increase the rate of seat belt compliance from 76 percent in 2002 to 91 percent this year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that this increase in simply obeying state law has saved 6,234 lives, prevented more than 100,000 serious injuries and saved Texas more than $23.6 billion in related economic costs.
Engineering advances, Lee said, may not get as much attention, but they clearly are saving lives.
Rumble strips — “cheap and effective, a great combination,” Wunderlich said — keep more people from wandering out of their lanes, as do wider shoulders on the road. Those really aren’t there to encourage drivers to stop and make phone calls or service their cars, but to give them more room to regain control of their car if they drift off.
On some rural road projects, engineers are pushing to have trees set even farther away from the highway to lessen the chance of vehicles striking them. Distracted drivers kill themselves on trees at alarming rates.
In 2019, 58 percent of police-reported fatal car accidents in the U.S. involved only one vehicle, according to Safer America. In the same year, single-vehicle run-offthe-road crashes resulted in 1,161 deaths in Texas, nearly one-third of all the state’s vehicle deaths in 2019.
The lighting of Texas highways will continue to improve, Lee said, and we’ll see more LED lighting in basic road signs, stop signs and directional arrows.
With rear-facing cameras and motion sensors, cars have become much safer than at the turn of the millennium, but Wunderlich says that if he could change any one thing all over the state, it would be the installation of a traffic feature that’s been in Europe for more than a century.
“Roundabouts. They would absolutely reduce traffic deaths,” Wunderlich said. “They feature the trifecta of safe systems: They slow people down, they change the angle of the crash and they drastically reduce the points of conflict,” as in four-way stops.
Just one of its features — the near elimination of the “T-bone” 90-degree-angle crash — might cut hundreds of annual auto deaths in a state that last year had 731 such fatalities at intersections.
Garland, a Dallas suburb where Wunderlich worked in city government for 17 years, had an intersection that saw 47 collisions over a period of several years. Converted to a traffic circle, it had zero, he said.
Wunderlich tells the story of a Garland official who was adamantly opposed to roundabouts until it occurred to him that they don’t force you to needlessly halt at an empty intersection and obey a red sign.
Ergo, roundabouts mean less government intrusion. Problem solved.
Texas is moving in the right direction in making road safety more of a budget priority, Wunderlich said.
“But are we where we want to be? No, not yet,” he said. “There’s never enough money to do the things you want, but society is definitely getting a good return on its investment. No money comes back to us when we reduce the number of crashes, but we all benefit.”