Daniel Sutter: Are our highways less safe?
Highway fatalities have increased from under 33,000 in 2014 to 37,461 in 2016, before declining slightly in 2017. Many have speculated whether drivers distracted by smart phones have caused this increase. Before further restricting driving, we should examine the problem. The recent increase in fatalities is unsettling because driving has become safer over time. Fifty years ago, over 50,000 Americans died annually on the highways; the worst year was 1972 with 54,589 deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Vehicle miles driven have increased dramatically as the death toll has fallen. Indeed, fatalities per mile driven have fallen by 80 percent since 1966. If we still had 1966’s fatality rate with today’s 3.2 trillion miles driven, we would have had 176,000 highway deaths in 2017. Has driving truly become more deadly since 2014? The increase in fatalities might seem to answer this in the affirmative, but real world data never lies exactly on a smooth curve. Could the recent increases in fatalities just be random variation? The two largest year-to-year percentage increases in highway fatalities were in 2015 and 2016, a total 14 percent increase. And yet multi-year fatality increases have occurred since 1966, including four consecutive years in the late 1970s and five consecutive years in the 1990s. The 1970’s fatalities increase was 15 percent. The recent increase in fatalities is not entirely unprecedented. Thankfully, a very small percentage of accidents produce fatalities. If roads are more dangerous, we should also see increases in injuries and accidents. NHTSA injury totals go back only to 1988 and are much less accurate than fatalities data. Still, reported injuries increased 34 percent, or 800,000, between 2014 and 2016, including a 28 percent increase in 2016. The largest previous one-year increase in injuries was only 6.5 percent. Reliable nationwide totals on accidents are not available. Not all states have seen fatality increases. In Alabama fatalities rose 26 percent between 2014 and 2016. Rhode Island had a 63 percent increase in fatalities, and eight other states saw increases of 30 percent or more. Yet fatalities declined in three states and increased less than 5 percent in four more. Are cell phones more distracting in some states than others? Substantial differences in fatality rates exist across states. Between 2014 and 2017, South Carolina’s rate was more than two and a half times higher than Massachusetts’. Factors like rural vs. urban driving, highway type, and speed limits explain much of this variation, but making driving in all states as safe as in the safest states could save thousands of lives annually. The NHTSA also reports fatalities by vehicle type, which have increased by 12 and 13 percent for cars and light trucks. Motorcyclists and bicyclists (15 percent each) and pedestrians (22 percent) saw larger increases, even though drivers of cars and trucks seem more likely to be distracted by cell phones. The fatality increases for cyclists and pedestrians suggest another cause, or may combine drivers’ distractions and these individuals’ vulnerability. Cell phone use and texting have been around longer than we perhaps remember; Washington state banned texting and driving in 2007. According to NHTSA statistics, drivers’ cell phone use has fallen over the past decade, and fatalities fell 20 percent nationally between 2007 and 2014. New phones provide more ways to distract drivers, but why did cell phones start increasing fatalities only in 2015? Many scholars from different disciplines study highway safety, including yours truly. To date, published research has not really addressed the recent jump in fatalities. World events drive academic research, so research should soon start offering concrete insights. Highway fatalities continue to impose a heavy toll on the U.S. Even though the fatality rate has fallen 80 percent since 1966, the modest increase in fatalities since 2014 should concern citizens and experts. Fortunately fatalities fell 3 percent during the first half of 2018. Perhaps the increase from 2014 to 2016 was only a pause in the long-term improvement in highway safety. Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
Daniel Sutter: Can highways be built safer?
Several serious accidents this year on a stretch of US 231 near Troy have raised the question of whether medians make highways safer. An Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) spokesperson and Troy Police Chief Randall Barr disagreed about medians in a Troy Messenger story. Traffic safety research addresses questions like this, and suggests that median barriers, if not medians themselves, provide considerable safety. ADOT’s Tony Harris was quoted in the Messenger saying, “Nearly every crash is caused by driver error or driver behavior. There is only so much we can do from an engineering standpoint to compensate for that.” The contribution of driver error to almost every accident is indisputable, and is why self-driving cars offer so much promise. But the design of roads also matters. According to the Federal Highway Administration, head-on collisions are three times more severe than other accidents, and higher speeds make these collisions worse. Rural two-lane roads and highways tend to produce high speed, head-on collisions, making rural driving more deadly than city driving. Although about as many deaths occur on rural and urban roads, much more driving occurs in urban areas. And even though heavy traffic and frequent stops and starts might make us think city driving is more dangerous, rural driving has head-on collisions, drowsiness from longer trips, and longer emergency response times. Road designs clearly affect fatalities. Freeways are the safest highways, as medians and limited entrances and exits make travel safe despite high speeds. Rural highways like US 231 (arterial roads for transportation geeks) have the highest fatality rate, about three times greater than rural interstates or urban arterial roads. Developed in the 1950s, concrete median “Jersey” barriers on urban freeways illustrate how roads can be made safer. I remember these barriers being installed around Detroit in the 1970s. The angled base helps direct vehicles back onto their side of the highway. Although hitting Jersey barriers damages cars, keeping vehicles from crossing into oncoming traffic saves lives. Jersey barriers were among the safety measures which reduced traffic deaths from 50,000 annually in the 1960s to less than 35,000 by 2009, despite a tripling of miles driven nationally. Fatalities per million miles driven have fallen by eighty percent over the last fifty years. To appreciate the significance of this, at 1960s fatality rates, today’s traffic volumes would result in over 120,000 additional highway deaths per year. Determining the exact contribution of Jersey barriers to the reduction in traffic deaths, as opposed to seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, and reduced tolerance of drinking and driving, is extremely difficult. Studies examining the effect of installing median barriers in North Carolina and South Carolina, though, provide reliable evidence. Cross-over fatalities fell by 90 percent, and 99 percent of vehicles veering into the median were prevented from crossing into the other lanes. North and South Carolina installed median cables, which at $55,000 per mile are far cheaper than Jersey barriers’ cost of $1 million per mile. Although Jersey barriers are sturdier, the combination of high effectiveness and low cost make median cables a better option for rural highways. Narrow grass medians may no longer be effective due to today’s higher traffic volume. The Federal Highway Authority now recommends barriers for medians less than 70 feet wide. At lower traffic volumes, grass medians provided enough stopping power for the occasional vehicle straying into the median. And the likelihood of a car which crossed the median striking a vehicle traveling the opposite direction was low. Today’s traffic volumes require barriers. Avoiding driver error is the best way to prevent accidents, but highways can be made safer. Technology creates new options, but also complicates decisions about long term safety investments. Cable median barriers may make sense today, but lane departure warnings and self-driving cars might render barriers unnecessary. Should we invest in barriers today, or wait for better technology? Sometimes I’m glad just to be offering commentary instead of making such decisions! ••• Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
Alabama’s highways rank 20th in condition, cost-effectiveness
Alabama ranks 20th in the nation when it comes to overall highway performance and cost-effectiveness, according to the 22nd annual Highway Report released on Thursday by the Los Angeles-based libertarian think tank, Reason Foundation. That’s up one spot from last year’s report, when Alabama ranked 21st in the nation. The study ranks every state’s highway system on pavement condition, traffic congestion, deficient bridges, traffic fatality rates, spending per-mile among others, based on spending and performance data that state highway agencies provided to the federal government for 2013, as well as 2014 congestion data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. “To determine relative performance, state highway system budgets (per mile of responsibility) are compared with system performance, state by state. States with high ratings typically have better-than-average highway system conditions — low numbers of deficient bridges and smooth pavement conditions — along with relatively low per-mile expenditures on metrics such as administrative costs,” the report reads. Other Alabama rankings in the report included: Fatality rate: 36th Deficient bridges: 25th Rural Interstate pavement condition: 34th Urban Interstate pavement condition: 37th Urbanized area congestion: 9th Rural arterial lane-width: 6th Rural arterial pavement condition: 16th Total disbursements per mile: 27th Administrative disbursements per mile: 35th Alabama’s state-controlled highway mileage makes it the 26th largest system. Here’s how Alabama compares to other states: South Carolina South Dakota Kansas Nebraska Maine Montana North Dakota Wyoming Ohio Mississippi New Mexico Missouri Utah Kentucky North Carolina Idaho Oklahoma Tennessee Texas Alabama Georgia Nevada Oregon Arizona West Virginia New Hampshire Minnesota Wisconsin Illinois Virginia Michigan Florida Arkansas Louisiana Colorado Indiana Delaware Maryland Pennsylvania Iowa Vermont California Washington Connecticut New York Massachusetts Rhode Island Hawaii New Jersey Alaska
