Why highway fatalities are going to fall
We’re headed for another year of increased carnage on Colorado roads. Fatalities are running ahead of last year’s tally at this point, and 2016 was a milestone of sorts itself. It marked the second year in a row when the death total spiked sharply.
More significantly, the fatality rate per million miles traveled also apparently jumped in both years (the official figure for 2016 is pending), breaking a long pattern of overall decline.
That’s alarming, but here’s a more hopeful way to look at the phenomenon: It’s the storm before the lull. Nationally, we’ve had these upticks in deaths before— the mid-1960s, for example. Yet safer cars and highways always kicked in to reduce the fatality rate dramatically over the long run, and new technology is poised to revive the trend.
The biggest near-term safety boost? It’s likely to come from automatic braking systems, which at the moment exist on about 10 percent of new cars sold in the U.S. But that percentage is going to rise fast. In Japan, more than half of new vehicles already come equipped with the technology, averting untold thousands of rear-end collisions.
As drivers adjust to having cars correct their mistakes, it’s only a matter of time before self-driving vehicles shoulder humans aside altogether— slashing accidents to a fraction of what they are today.
In that regard, the Colorado legislature probably did more this year to enhance highway safety by passing a bill that sets a minimalist framework for the testing of automated vehicles than by approving a law that boosts fines to $300 for texting while driving.
To be sure, government officials and insurance executives are nearly unanimous in fingering the smartphone as one of the main culprits in the recent uptick in fatalities — both in Colorado and across the country. As smartphone ownership has become the norm, the perils of distracted driving are overwhelming the advantages of newer, safer vehicles, these experts say.
“What the data tell me is we have an epidemic of distracted driving,” the executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) told The Colorado Statesman earlier this year. “People on phones, on their devices.”
Shailen Bhatt is probably right, although some data is inconclusive. For example, he cites the steep rise in deaths last year of motorcyclists, pedestrians and bicyclists in Colorado as the likely result of distracted driving. But pedestrian and bicycle deaths in particular bounce around year to year, and pedestrian deaths actually declined as recently as 2015 before last year’s jump. One year does not make a trend.
Motorcycle deaths are more in line with Bhatt’s narrative. They’ve spiked 50 percent over the past four years— and not because a flood of new riders hit the road.
In a report the state released a few weeks ago, the percentage of all crashes attributed to distracted driving spiked significantly between 2011 and 2015, although the number of “distracted drivers in fatal crashes” gyrated up and down rather than climb steadily.
The data aside, distracted driving certainly seems to be more rampant than before the introduction of the iphone in 2007. One obvious indicator: the frequency withwhich motorists fail to respondwhen a light turns because they’re looking down at their laps. For that matter, the fact that the overall highway fatality rate incolorado bottomed out in 2011 must have some explanation beyond the recession’s end.
Indeed, officials have little choice but to attempt to discourage smartphone distractions such as texting. But it’s an uphill struggle, and tickets from the newlaware likely to be rare. Given the prevalence of tinted glass, howcan cops even seewhat drivers are doing?
CDOT’S Sam Cole maintains the state could save 60 lives (or 10 percent of last year’s fatalities) if everyone wore a seat belt, and avert 25 motorcycle deaths if every rider wore a helmet (most who died did not). Seat belt compliance actually dipped last year, according to a state survey, and is well below the high-90s that exists in some states that make the failure to wear a seat belt a primary offense— meaning police can stop and ticket drivers without a triggering event.
Two years ago, Colorado adopted an official policy of “Moving Towards Zero Death” on the highways. The timing recalls Denver’s embarrassingly futile pledge some years ago to eliminate homelessness by 2015. Yet there is this difference: The vast majority of highway deaths really are caused by reckless or careless human behavior. Even if the payoff in changing behavior has limits, self-correcting and self-driving technology has only begun to make its influence felt.
Not zero deaths, then, but a reduction to a small number by today’s standards sounds achievable. But first we may to have to endure a tragic blip in the opposite direction.
Vincent Carroll is a former Denver Post and Rockymountain News editorial page editor. Email him at vcarro52@outlook.com.