Pedestrian Deaths Would Have Risen Without the Pandemic, Study Shows

A new study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety shows that traffic fatalities in the United States were projected to rise just as sharply even if the pandemic had not shut down roads and created conditions for faster driving, reports Kea Wilson in Streetsblog USA.

According to the study, “pre-pandemic models were already predicting a series of record years for pedestrian deaths, since they'd been trained on more than a decade of increasingly deadly data — and that prediction unfortunately, came true.”

The study finds that one likely explanation for the spike in traffic deaths during the pandemic is “a sharp increase in "aberrant driving behaviors" like speeding regardless of who else was on the road, alcohol-impaired driving, and driving without a license.”

However, principal researcher Brian Tefft cautioned that “we can't blame the roadway death crisis on a few bad-apple drivers cracking under pandemic-era stress — especially when systemic solutions exist to save lives even when motorists are driving like maniacs.” Tefft advises a safe system approach that focuses on design, infrastructure, and technology as ways to reduce risks to drivers and pedestrians. “Impaired driving prevention technology, speed limiters on cars, and speed-reducing road designs could all have curbed the bloodshed during the early days of COVID-19 — just like they could have saved lives before the pandemic and since.”