Driving Went Down. Fatalities Went Up. Here's Why.

(Source: Unsplash.)

Americans drove less during the early months of the pandemic, yet traffic fatalities increased. There was a sense among many safety experts that this was an anomaly, that fatality rates would revert to trend once people started driving again. That didn’t happen.

Instead, as overall driving levels have returned to normal, crashes and fatality rates have remained shockingly high. These results are not explainable by any theory of traffic safety being used by modern transportation professionals.

As a result, there has been a search for explanations, one that has embraced some of our newest and most divisive cultural narratives while simultaneously managing to rehash some old and worn-out memes. All this while missing the obvious factor that is, in some ways, too painful for industry insiders to acknowledge. 

So, what is going on?

The Official Explanation

Official explanations for traffic fatalities tend to flow from the needs of the insurance industry to assess blame as part of resolving claims. This is why driver error is the obsessive focus of most crash analyses, to the exclusion of other factors (like road design) where there is nobody to easily bring into a lawsuit (because municipalities have broad immunity). The central question police and crash investigators try to answer is: who messed up and to what extent? If that can be satisfactorily ascertained, then the incident can be resolved and we can all move on (metaphorically speaking).

Last month, the Los Angeles Times had the most thoroughly written recitation of the expert narrative for the increase in fatalities in their article, “Car crash deaths have surged during COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s why.” If the pandemic has made you loathsome of broad swaths of your fellow Americans, the expert narrative is a truckload of confirmation bias.

According to the experts, the pandemic has “made U.S. drivers more reckless — more likely to speed, drink or use drugs and leave their seat belts unbuckled.” This deadly and damaging behavior is due to “widespread feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression” that has caused fatalism to seep in, as if Americans are welcoming a brush with death.

“We might decide: What does a seat belt or another beer matter, anyway, when we’re in the middle of a pandemic?” says Shannon Frattaroli, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The pandemic has supposedly “changed our psychology,” making us more rebellious with reckless driving being one manifestation of that rebelliousness. “You’ve been cooped up, locked down, and have restrictions you chafe at,” said one psychology professor interviewed by the Times, suggesting that lockdowns induce an “arousal breakout,” where repressed Americans break free in an orgy of speeding without wearing a seatbelt.  

And to tie it all together into the comfortable narrative of the selfish versus the selfless, another highway safety expert is suggesting that reckless driving, “is part of a national decline in civility that accelerated during the pandemic.” The pandemic has made us mean and insensitive, not just on social media but in the way we drive our vehicles. It is “a sign of the overall lack of consideration we’re showing for other citizens, whether it be wearing masks, or not getting vaccinated, or how we drive.”

“It’s very aggressive. It’s very selfish.”

That last assertion is an easy one to test. Is there a correlation between vaccination rates or mask adoption and the spike in traffic fatality rates? Do the “selfish” unvaccinated and unmasked areas have greater spikes in traffic fatalities than the more selfless areas, where not only are people masked and vaccinated but there are calm, sober, courteous drivers wearing their seatbelts and following traffic laws? Of course not, but it’s an affirming and thus easily believable story for many, nonetheless.

None of this is to suggest that there have not been changes to behavior that may show up in driving statistics. A small but not insignificant number of Americans self-reported in one survey that they are more likely to speed (7.6%) and to drink and drive (7.6%) than before the pandemic. This isn’t surprising; with work from home, a lot of evening behaviors (like having a beer or a glass of wine) have become daytime behaviors, just like a lot of daytime behaviors (work) have become all-day behaviors. 

I’m skeptical that this modest shift in self-reported anticipated behavior is the underlying cause of such a dramatic and widespread phenomenon. I’m also not buying the psychological explanations that are predicated on how deranged and nasty we have suddenly become, especially those people that are outside of the in-group of the expert class. 

I have a different theory, one that doesn’t rely on us buying into narratives about how others are reckless, selfish, and mean. My theory, however, is more difficult for transportation experts to come to grips with, which is I suspect why it is not being widely discussed.

(Source: Unsplash.)

What is Actually Going On

I wrote a whole book—Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town—to explain why our transportation system continues to kill astounding numbers of people and how addressing it will also fix the finances of our cities, along with making many of our other broader social struggles a little easier to manage. 

To summarize: We have overbuilt, overengineered, and over-designed our roads and streets based on the belief that having greater buffers, more maneuvering room, and increased recovery area is how we improve safety. Except in very specific situations, such as interstates outside of urban areas, this belief is wrong.

Don’t feel bad if this is not intuitive to you; most transportation professionals struggle with the insight, as well. It feels like having more buffer room provides more margin for error, but the reality is that more margin for error induces higher speeds. It signals to drivers that there is a greater margin for error (in a sense, there is) and so they feel comfortable speeding up. This is very human behavior that is far from anything that should be considered deviant.

High speeds are not dangerous, per se. The real danger comes when high speeds are combined with randomness. When lethal speeds occur in an environment where drivers enter and exit the traffic stream, where there are intersections, drivers pulling in and out of driveways and parking stalls—all of these things create random and unexpected interactions, and the higher speeds reduce the margin of error, with tragic consequences.

You can make such environments safe in one of three ways. You can eliminate driver error, which for obvious and self-serving reasons is the favored approach of the experts in the field. Fixing humans and their embedded flaws is a longstanding hubris of a certain mindset of people that have never read, and been astonished by, the work of Daniel Khaneman and Amos Tversky. As any biologist will tell you, humans are slightly evolved chimpanzees. There is a lot of beauty in that insight, but it only makes us human, not perfectible potential-gods.

More realistically, the second thing you can do is to remove randomness (close intersections, eliminate parking, etc.) and thus eliminate the statistical likelihood of a tragedy occurring. The third and final thing that can be done is to slow speeds, thus increasing the margin for error and lowering the stakes of any collision. (I’ll acknowledge a fourth option—the long-promised revolution in automated vehicles—which is almost as much a fantasy as it is a distraction.)

Here’s my theory of why we have seen a spike in traffic deaths that is not abating, despite traffic levels returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Prior to the pandemic, overwhelming levels of traffic congestion artificially reduced speeds for much of the day and, in doing so, artificially reduced the number of traffic deaths compared to what would be experienced in free-flow conditions. The more congestion and the longer it lasts, the more fatality rates go down.

When the pandemic began, that congestion went away, allowing the drivers that remained to exploit the full operating capacity of the roadway that had been overengineered for them. Speeds went up, along with the number of random interactions, which is the fatal combination.

While traffic has returned to near-normal volume overall, what has not returned to normal is the duration of intense congestion. With work-from-home being normalized, more drivers have the flexibility to choose when they want to take an auto trip. They are choosing to drive during non-peak times, which has the effect of spreading out the overall traffic volume, while reducing the length of those periods of stifling congestion. The result is that a greater volume of traffic is now being exposed to the most dangerous conditions: high speeds and randomness.

And that is how we get more deaths with less traffic, no assumption of individual derangement or selfishness required.

It is also how we get weird sampling data showing more people in crashes showing up impaired, distracted, or without seatbelts. They are the ones more likely to be in a crash in these dangerous conditions, but they were always there. There aren’t meaningfully more of them, there are just statistically more opportunities now for their trip to wreak havoc.

Hypotheses to Test My Theory

Every good theory generates a testable hypothesis. I suggested earlier that we could test the “selfishness” theory, as defined by the experts, by looking at crash data correlated with vaccination rates. It’s not being tested because it’s a silly theory.

The theory that a meaningful portion of our population has become reckless, rebellious, and fatalistic and that mental shift has induced them to speed, forgo a seatbelt, and drive impaired, is more of an assertion of beliefs than something data can confirm. I’d be interested in how cognitive psychologists might test this hypothesis, but I suspect they might find it easier to test the defensive attribution error of the experts. 

My theory can be tested through a hypothesis, however. If I am correct, we should be able to evaluate crash data and plot the time of day that fatalities occurred. Before the pandemic, those crashes should cluster outside times of peak congestion. For the last year, the times of fatal crashes should have become more diffuse throughout the day.

I don’t have access to this data, but others do, including the transportation experts making absurd and unsupported claims about a rise in recklessness. I’d love to collaborate with anyone with access to this data who is interested in getting beyond the political narratives to focus on what is really killing people.

I have a second hypothesis I’d like to put forth, but it may require a much larger dataset than one region or one year. If I’m correct, the traffic calming effect of congestion has less impact on rural roadways or, as the L.A. Times asserted, on “back roads,” where they claim fatalities have “spiked” since the pandemic. I don’t think they have spiked. These roads are really dangerous all the time, which already shows up (as my theory would predict) in higher fatality rates per mile driven in rural areas than in urban areas. 

The data problem is that there are statistically fewer fatal crashes in rural areas, a situation that may induce us to be fooled by randomness. To test this second hypothesis, we are going to need multiple years of data (I would guess a decade or more) and, if I’m correct, it should show relatively no change in fatality rates in truly rural areas, that is, those roads outside of a major metropolitan commuter area. In other words, new work-from-home driving patterns will have little measurable impact on rural road fatality rates where congestion is a non-factor.

Why This is Important

Chuck, the selfish anti-vaxxer, the fatalistic drunk, and the reckless speeder all causing mayhem and death on our roadways are such compelling and comforting narratives—why do you have to ruin this story?

For many years, my greatest criticism has been reserved for those professionals who are too comfortable with a transportation system that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. Blaming the user for being killed on the roads that you design takes a special kind of ignoble conceit, one that permeates transportation professions. When it mixes with the politically reinforced cultural memes that are dividing our society, intellectual laziness moves beyond mere perniciousness to a form of institutionalized corruption. I’m disgusted by it.

Spending money on safety initiatives aimed at fixing the deviant human is an insulting waste of resources, at best. At worst, it is a backdoor conduit for funding law enforcement and roadway expansions, all in the deceptive guise of safety. 

Our approach to transportation spending robs us of our potential, not only squandering resources today but committing us to paying for the future maintenance of unproductive infrastructure. If that were all, the case for reform would be overwhelming. 

Of course, that isn’t all. Our approach to transportation is killing people, our friends and neighbors. Around 40,000 last year alone. It leaves hundreds of thousands of others with traumatic injury. This should be wholly unacceptable to everyone.

And it should compel all of us, especially the experts who work on traffic safety, to get beyond the safety narratives we are comfortable with to something that will actually save lives.

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