Dive Brief:
- Amid more than 40,000 traffic deaths a year from 2021 to 2023, a study published Tuesday by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine urges the U.S. Department of Transportation to streamline road safety guidance for states and municipalities and establish a national road safety research center.
- The report says that recommendations to improve road safety made by other previous studies “were not pursued even as the country’s long-term gains in road safety waned.” However, the researchers say that the five recommendations the study sets forth can be sustained over the years and yield a greater impact.
- The study came in response to a request from the Federal Highway Administration, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Dive Insight:
Traffic deaths soared from a low in 2014 of 32,744 to 42,785 in 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The National Safety Council estimated the social costs of traffic fatalities in 2021 at nearly half a trillion dollars, including medical care, property damage and the value of lives lost in these accidents.
In addition to the recommendations to create a national road safety research center and simplify the guidance for states and cities to select the appropriate, evidence-based countermeasures to reduce crashes, the study outlines three additional recommendations for the U.S. DOT to undertake:
- Establish a data-driven national road safety research agenda, developed by an independent committee, to set road safety research priorities.
- Evaluate the efficacy of common road safety measures through an ongoing research program.
- Develop education and training programs on road safety for use in universities and professional certifications.
A subset of traffic fatalities — pedestrian deaths — has gained attention as those killed while walking rose 77% from 2010 to 2021. Black and African American pedestrians are nearly twice as likely to be killed as White pedestrians, with Hispanic or Latino pedestrians 38% more at risk of death than White pedestrians.
The study concludes, “There is a growing audience for solutions to the country’s road safety crisis and a growing recognition that well-targeted and evidence-based research that can be translated into practice must play a prominent role in finding and fielding these solutions.”
Smart Cities Dive reviewed a pre-publication version of the report.
