Highway Safety director: Here’s what it’ll take to make NC roads less deadly
Within a month of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at home-orders in March 2020, North Carolina traffic safety officials noticed an unusual trend. Despite considerably fewer drivers on the road, the number of people being killed on N.C. roads held steady. Within a few months, that number started rising, despite a drastic decline in miles traveled.
Our office began calling attention to this strange and dangerous trend, and by early summer national media such as the Wall Street Journal followed suit, reporting on fewer drivers engaging in more dangerous behavior than ever before.
In 2020, traffic fatalities in North Carolina rose 13% above 2019 totals. By the end of 2021, it was clear that the pandemic wasn’t the only public health crisis confronting the state.
More drivers, passengers, pedestrians and cyclists are being killed than ever before on North Carolina’s streets and highways. Many expected better results in 2021, but preliminary data from the N.C. Department of Transportation reported the highest number of traffic fatalities since 1973.
Why? It’s too early to know exactly what is causing this phenomenon. Some speculate that fewer cars on the roads early in the pandemic meant more opportunities to speed, and that behavior remained even after people started driving more. The emotional distraction of the pandemic may play a role, too — people are caught up in their own thoughts and paying less attention to their own safety or others around them.
What we do know is that this trend has been especially bad for some groups — in particular, there was a sharp uptick in 2021 among pedestrians and older drivers.
This is a complex problem, and there’s no single solution to making our roads safer. In the past, we’ve looked for a silver bullet, such as more enforcement or better road design. But there is no silver bullet.
Instead, we can look to strategies used to address the pandemic public health crisis to inform how we address the traffic safety public health crisis. To combat Covid-19, we’ve adopted layers of protection- a mask, social distancing, vaccines and quality health care. Use each layer of protection and chances of transmission are greatly reduced. Take a layer away and we’re less protected.
We need similar layers of protection to keep us safe on our roadways: safe, well-designed roads; safe cars that protect driver, passenger and pedestrians; safer users who are expected to abide by equitable traffic laws and face consequences if they don’t; safe speeds to reduce the rising increase in speed-related crashes; and quality post-crash care in the event all of these layers fail at some level.
The U.S. Department of Transportation recently adopted this “Safe Systems” approach when it announced the National Roadway Safety Strategy, which takes a more comprehensive approach to keeping us safe on our roadways.
At the N.C. Governor’s Highway Safety Program, we work to ensure safe drivers through over 100 projects with law enforcement, hospitals, local governments and others to change driver behavior. We encourage actions a driver or passenger can take to keep themselves safe — behaviors we know greatly reduce the chances of being seriously hurt or killed in a motor vehicle crash, such as: always buckling up, slowing down, and never driving distracted or impaired.
We recognize, however, that while safe driver behavior is an important part of the puzzle, it’s not the only piece. Creating safe communities is a shared responsibility.
Winston Churchill said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Let’s use the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to cure the roadway safety crisis and help us achieve our ultimate goal of zero deaths on our state’s roadways.