What's interesting about this is that it doesn't look like it accounts for the expected reduction in deaths due to lockdown -- a lot of people die in car accidents every year, and at least early on in the pandemic, miles traveled was reduced by nearly 90%, and car accidents went way down, and even further down when you consider it was impossible to drive home drunk from a bar.
Which means the excess deaths would be even higher than shown here, at least early on.
EDIT: Looks like I am wrong. Below someone links to a report showing that traffic fatalities actually went up because the people still on the road were more risky. I was basing my statement on estimates made in early 2020.
Note that deaths per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) went up during Covid. Reducing commuting time doesn't necessarily reduce deaths under that metric -- just the opposite! Commuter trips are probably the safest per VMT since they're the most familiar.
There were stories about this effect, even as total collisions went down because of the bigger drop in VMT[1]. I speculated that this was a combination of
a) the above effect (stripping out the safer commuter trips), plus
b) the roads being dominated by people least willing to follow the advice to stay home, which correlates with being anti-social and reckless (mean though that sounds! [2])
My facebook friends suggested
c) the immense stress of coping with the Covid world made the average person less able to concentrate.
I also suspect:
d) traffic enforcement was reduced and drivers gradually started branching out into more aggressive maneuvers as they became aware of this.
Note that people saw their car insurance rates go down during covid because the typical personal policy only cares about accidents per unit time, and rarely adjusts for miles driven.
But I don't know why it hasn't regressed to the pre-covid levels -- probably because WFH hasn't completely reversed.
At the current count of a minimum of 354,000 deaths, we would have to mitigate 26% of traffic deaths world wide for the entire year before it would make up for the fatalities caused by COVID19. So far it appears that traffic fatalities haven't decreased that much during the lockdown. In California, where we have good figures for this sort of thing, there has only been an 8% decrease in fatal accidents for the first 3 months of 2020 despite an 18.6% drop in number of miles driven.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the decrease in traffic fatalities will offset more than a fraction of the deaths due to COVID19. Especially considering that the death toll is projected to easily exceed 1 million worldwide.
"As deaths due to covid increased, the percentage of deaths due to car crashes has decreased"
I somehow think that doesn't mean we made any progress in car/traffic safety. And should not be used as an argument to dismiss/minimize the impact of traffic fatalities.
I remember at the beginning of quarantine and social distancing, thinking that at least road deaths would go down because there would be less traffic. Unfortunately that has not been the case, as it looks like road deaths spiked sharply, at least in the US. Full statistics will take a while to compile, but initial results do not look good.
> an estimated 38,680 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. This represents an increase of about 7.2 percent as compared to the 36,096 fatalities reported in 2019. Preliminary data from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) shows vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2020 decreased by about 430.2 billion miles, or about a 13.2-percent decrease.
SF traffic fatalities have not been increasing year-over-year. You can't cast blame for an outcome that doesn't exist.
Data: https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/services-informatio.... SWITRS hasn't published a report since 2020 due to the pandemic, but that works perfectly fine for my purposes because I'd have probably had to discard those years for other reasons, and since we're talking about a ten- or fifteen-year trend I'm perfectly okay coming to a conclusion based on data from 2011 to 2020. Traffic fatalities per city are in section 8 chart E.
I choose traffic fatalities as the metric because federal and state reporting laws mean that these numbers will be effectively complete - there is no sampling or selection effect, unlike numbers about traffic enforcement.
The first couple lines of linked WSJ article says differently, though I don't have a WSJ account so I can't say if this is an actual rise or just the result of a higher driving population
Motor vehicle deaths per 100,000 have been on a consistent downward trend since the 70s (1.53 per 100,000 in 2000, 1.11 per 100,000 in 2019), so, no, death rates have in fact been lowered.
Good point. So the article mentions the deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. In 2021 it was 1.33, down slightly from 1.34 in 2020. However, I recall that in 2020 the deaths per VMT jumped up.[1]
Shouldn’t they measure in miles driven, not per population? And then cross reference other transit safety?
Reduced deaths on roads could simply be due to less driving. If everybody moves to a less-safe transit option, that’s not a good thing. (Other transit likely is safer, but we shouldn’t just sssume it is)
Failing to do so assumes people aren’t dying using other transit.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/during-covid-19-road-fatalities-inc...
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