U.S. Road Deaths Keep Rising

More people are dying on U.S. roads than any year since 2005, according to a recent report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), with almost 43,000 people dying in vehicle crashes in both 2021 and 2022. As Michael Brady explains in Smart Cities Dive, the rise in deaths between 2020 and 2021 is “the second year-to-year increase since 2019 and the largest year-to-year percentage increase since the agency started collecting data in 1975, the report says.”

Fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists increased by 13 percent and 1.9 percent between 2020 and 2021, and “The estimated number of people injured on U.S. roadways also rose from 2.3 million in 2020 to 2.5 million in 2021 — a 9.4% year-to-year increase, NHTSA found.”

One solution supported by traffic safety advocates is lower speed limits, which have been shown to reduce the likelihood of crashes and injuries. “According to Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, reducing speeds by 1 mph can decrease deadly crashes by 17%.” The Urban Institute also recommends automatic speed cameras, safer pedestrian infrastructure, and smaller vehicles as additional ways to reduce traffic deaths and injuries.