Monthly Archives: January 2023

Jan. 23, 2023 – AXIOS – Despite Austin’s efforts to tamp down traffic deaths, they just keep going up.  The big picture: Austin voters approved $65 million in bonds in 2020 to carry out traffic safety measures to prevent roadway injuries, but a record 122 people died on Austin roads last year.  By the numbers: Traffic fatalities are going up on a per capita basis, too, from 7.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2018 to 11.5 in 2022, per city statistics. (Serious injuries have generally held steady.) Most of the crashes happen on state highways such as I-35 — wide roads that are designed for higher speeds.  Yes, but: The city has recorded a 31% decrease in serious injury and fatal crashes on the stretches of about 20 roads where the city has made improvements over the last half-dozen years.

• These areas include: East Oltorf Street and Parker Lane, Lakeline Boulevard and 183, and Slaughter Lane and Menchaca Road.
• “Changing the design of our streets is the most effective strategy for reducing severe crashes over time,” per a 2022 city analysis.

Between the lines: Austin has a Vision Zero policy that calls for safer street systems, lower speed limits and redesigning the most dangerous intersections.

• Vision Zero had a ten-year goal set upon the initial policy adoption back in 2015, and “the city has consistently recognized that’s an ambitious goal and something that no government of our size has accomplished in such a short time frame,” city transportation department spokesperson Jeff Stensland tells Axios.

Of note: Austin authorities can implement traffic safety measures only on streets the city owns — roads and highways overseen by the Texas Department of Transportation are under state control.

What they’re saying: “It is illogical not to have a goal to end traffic deaths,” Jay Blazek Crossley, who oversees the nonprofit Farm & City, which pushes for Vision Zero plans across Texas, tells Axios. “In general, our society has willfully ignored the toll. Part of it is simply pulling the blinders off all our eyes and saying, ‘No, this really sucks.'”

• In 2019, TxDOT set a goal of cutting traffic deaths in half by 2035 and totally eliminating them by 2050.
• But there’s work to do. At least one person has died on Texas roads every day since Nov. 7, 2000.

The bottom line: Even as cars have new safety features, drivers are more distracted than ever.

DETROIT (AP) — Traffic crashes in the U.S. cost society $340 billion in one year, or just over $1,000 for each of the country’s 328 million people, according to a study by safety regulators.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it studied crashes in calendar year 2019 that killed an estimated 36,500 people, injured 4.5 million and damaged 23 million vehicles.

“This report drives home just how devastating traffic crashes are for families, and the economic burden they place on society,” Ann Carlson, acting administrator of the agency, said in a statement Tuesday.  With fatal crashes rising dramatically in 2021, the Transportation Department began pushing a “safe systems approach” to reduce crashes. It includes safer roads, behavior, vehicles and speeds, as well as better after-crash care.

In the report, researchers examined several NHTSA databases as well as crashes not reported to police that were gathered through consumer surveys, NHTSA’s statement said.  The cost of the crashes amounted to 1.6% of the $21.4 trillion gross domestic product in 2019, the agency said.

People not directly involved in crashes pay for roughly 75% of all crash costs through insurance premiums, taxes, lost time from road congestion, excess fuel consumption and environmental impacts, the study found.

The study also calculated that from 1975 to 2019, seat belt use saved 404,000 lives and prevented $17.8 trillion in societal harm, NHTSA said.

Nearly 43,000 people were killed on U.S. roads in 2021, the highest number in 16 years as Americans returned to the roads. The 10.5% jump over 2020 numbers was the largest percentage increase since NHTSA began its fatality data collection system in 1975. Estimates for the first nine months of last year show that crash deaths dropped 0.2% compared with the same period of 2021. But the government says the number is still unacceptably high.   In an effort to reduce the deaths, the federal government is sending $5 billion in aid to cities and localities to slow vehicles, carve out bike paths and nudge commuters to public transit.