Number of Pa. road deaths climbing
Fatalities increase despite people staying home in pandemic
Despite a dramatic decrease in driving brought on by the pandemic this year, more people are dying on Pennsylvania roads than in 2019. And a Morning Call review of road fatalities in the Lehigh Valley suggests the trend may have been worse here.
The available statistics at the state and national level fly in the face of what safety experts have come to expect after decades of analysis.
Historically, exposure was the main factor — when Americans drove more, fatalities went up. But driving during the pandemic has seen just the opposite.
“It is astounding. It is counter to any trend in any other time frame we have ever analyzed,” said Ken Kolosh, the National Safety Council’s manager of statistics. “It’s just so inconsistent with previous recession periods. This is going to be studied for years if not decades to better understand.”
State and federal governments have released preliminary traffic and crash data through September. Based on the early findings, some safety experts believe drivers in the United States, including
in Pennsylvania, have developed poor driving habits in the stress of the moment. A preliminary study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the late spring and summer found motorists were more likely to be speeding, not wearing a seat belt or intoxicated than they were before the pandemic.
“These drivers, along with a potential reduction in law enforcement and safety messaging, are possible factors that created an environment more conducive to risky driving and increased fatality rates,” the study found.
Less driving, but more deaths
As the pandemic broke in late March, much of the country went into an extended lockdown — shutting down schools, limiting which businesses could open and encouraging people to telecommute when possible. As a result, the number of vehicles on the road dropped significantly. By April, the number of miles traveled on Pennsylvania roads fell by 46.5%, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The number of fatal wrecks in the state dropped by 39%, according to the National Safety Council.
But that trend ended with the lockdown. Although people now aren’t driving as much as they were before the pandemic, the number of highway deaths has surged since the lockdown was lifted. In June, traffic was down 15.5% year-over-year, but fatalities climbed 14.6% compared with June 2019, the opposite of what experts expected. That trend has played out every month since.
Overall, motorists have traveled 64.7 billion miles through Pennsylvania through September, according to the FHA, a 16.7% decrease from last year through the same time period. By the National Safety Council’s estimate, 874 people died on Pennsylvania roads through September, a 3.1% increase from 2019.
The phenomenon appears to be playing out nationally as well. The FHA estimates national traffic levels have fallen 14.5% this year, but early estimates suggest fatalities grew by 5.4%.
It appears the Lehigh Valley has seen a spike in road deaths, too. While PennDOT will not release detailed statistics of traffic accidents in the region for months, a Morning Call review of media reports identified 48 people who died in crashes in Lehigh and Northampton counties through Thursday. That marks a 20% jump in fatalities over all of 2019, when 40 people died in motor vehicle crashes. If more people don’t die in crashes over the last few weeks of 2020, it would be the most people killed in Lehigh Valley crashes since 2017, when 51 people died.
That comes despite traffic levels falling off locally due to the pandemic. Sensors built into regional highways show traffic fell steeply on Interstate 78 near Lanark (an 18.6% decrease) and near the Route 33 interchange (a 21.6% decrease). Route 309 near Coopersburg has seen a 16% decrease in traffic. A sensor installed last year on Route 33 near the Route 248 interchange is too new for an accurate yearover-year comparison, but its results suggest traffic has fallen off as well.
Drivers taking more risks
Government officials across the country started sounding the alarm in late spring when death rates — but not total number of deaths — jumped. GPS data collected from cellphones showed the people still driving were going much faster on the emptier roads, and police across the country wrote significantly more tickets for people exceeding 100 mph. The overall number of crashes dropped, but the extra speed meant the crashes that did occur were more often deadlier.
NHTSA found other risky behaviors spiked as well. According to preliminary data, the number of people being ejected from car crashes across the country doubled in April from the year before, a sign that people weren’t wearing seat belts. Early reports from states such as Virginia and Minnesota also uncovered a jump of drivers and passengers not wearing seat belts.
Early findings also suggest that the number of people driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs jumped. NHTSA reviewed statistics from a sample of trauma centers and found the number of people injured in crashes after March 17 who tested positive for alcohol, marijuana and opioids increased significantly compared with the months before the pandemic took root.
The NHTSAstudy and Kolosh concluded states may need to step up traffic enforcement to bring things back to normal. Risky drivers tend to be opportunistic — they’ll speed when they think they can do so safely and when there aren’t police around to pull them over. A massive traffic enforcement crackdown along with a media blitz reminding drivers to travel safely may be needed to bring things back to their prepandemic levels, Kolosh said.
Earlier this year, PennDOT officials said the climbing rate of fatal crashes was too small a sample to read into, and at the time, the total number of deaths was down year-over-year.
This week, PennDOT spokesperson Jennifer Kuntch said the department crafts safety strategies after observing longterm traffic patterns, the same approach government agencies typically follow across the country. PennDOT has stepped up some social media messaging promoting driver awareness and the dangers of impaired or distracted driving, but no other efforts are currently planned, Kuntch said.
“PennDOT hasn’t identified any data yet that would necessitate a change in our approach, but once we analyze the full year of data, if there is something identified we would incorporate changes into our strategic highway safety plan so that PennDOT staff, as well as our safety partners, had a consistent approach to address the issue,” she said.
In the meantime, drivers need to honestly compare how they’re driving now to how they were driving in 2019, Kolosh said. While drivers tend to overestimate their driving ability, they should be able to accurately assess if they’re taking more risks such as speeding, driving aggressively or driving while impaired.
Stopping the steady increase in road deaths may be difficult, he said. Traffic volumes still haven’t returned to prepandemic levels, so things could get worse when the roads get more crowded but the risky driving behaviors linger.
“Unfortunately, many of the drivers are going to have their poor driving habits persist,” he said. “I could see fatalities on our road continue to be elevated after the pandemic is officially over. Theproblemcouldpotentially get worse over a short period of time.”