Fatality Rate Rises 14% as Drivers Speed Through Sparse Traffic
Fatality Rate Rises 14% as Drivers Speed Through Sparse Traffic
(Bloomberg) -- The Michigan State Police recently caught a driver barreling down Interstate 75 at 180 miles per hour. Maryland troopers cited seven motorists in a single day for topping 100 mph on the Capital Beltway surrounding Washington. And California’s Highway Patrol issued 87% more tickets to people driving at triple-digit speeds than they did a year ago.
Across the U.S., police say some drivers are treating freeways cleared out by stay-at-home directives as a license to accelerate. And that appears to be making the roads deadlier: The rate of traffic deaths per 100 million miles driven jumped 14% in March compared to the same month a year before, even as Americans drove nearly 19% fewer miles according to preliminary estimates from the National Safety Council.
The overall number of fatalities fell 8%, but 1.22 people died in traffic crashes for every 100 million miles driven, compared to 1.07 in March 2019, the group estimated.
“We cannot emphatically say all of this is speeding,” said Ken Kolosh, manager of statistics at the safety council who authored the analysis. “We can emphatically say our roads were riskier this March than they were last year.”
The non-profit organization says additional work is needed to draw firm conclusions about what’s causing the higher fatality rate, but pointed out that anecdotal accounts of speeding, one of the most common causes of deadly crashes, are widespread.
Kolosh cautioned that the NSC’s fatality figures lacked details such as whether pedestrians or bicyclists were involved. He added that other behavioral changes related to the coronavirus pandemic may also be pushing up the fatality rate, such as pedestrians walking in the street to avoid people on sidewalks.
But law enforcement agencies report rampant speeding across the U.S. In the four weeks after California’s stay-home order took effect on March 19, the California Highway Patrol issued nearly 2,500 tickets for speeding at more than 100 mph, an 87% increase from 1,335 during the same period last year. At the same time, traffic volumes in the state were down by 35% on average, the agency said last month.
Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka said impaired driving at night and excessive speeds of between 90 mph and 100 mph are both on the rise. “Our last four fatal crashes involved vehicles traveling at these reckless speeds,” he said in an email.
The Maryland State Police for weeks have been increasing their presence on highways around the nation’s capital in response to complaints about speeding and aggressive driving.
The police cited speeding as a contributing factor in two crashes involving jackknifed semi-tractor trailers that occurred within 12 hours of each other in late April. Between March 15 and April 24, just one of the state police barracks wrote 800 traffic citations and issued 108 warnings, mostly on the interstate freeways encircling Washington that make up the Capital Beltway.
Lt. Brian Oleksyk, a public information officer with the Michigan State Police, says troopers have reported seeing more speeding drivers since Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer asked residents to avoid nonessential travel as part of her administration’s stay-home directives.
Officers from his district ticketed a driver in Monroe County for driving 180 miles per hour, 110 mph over the posted speed limit, he said.
Oleksyk attributed the rise in speeding to a decrease in traffic “and I believe people didn’t think we would be out there enforcing high-speed and reckless driving, but we have been and we are.”
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