Identification of Factors Contributing to the Decline of Traffic Fatalities in the United States from 2008 to 2012 (2020)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

14 Figure 4-1 shows trends in fatal crashes, traffic fatalities, and crashes of all severities over the period. All crashes are estimated from NHTSA’s General Estimates System (GES). Fatal crashes and fatalities are derived from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) file.1 The trends are shown normalized to 2001, the number of crashes and fatalities for each year shown as a ratio to the number in 2001. Normalizing in this way facilitates comparisons of trends in frequencies of significantly different magnitudes—there were around 6 million crashes per year but only around 38,000 fatal crashes. The trends illustrated in the figure are notable in four ways: 1. The numbers of fatal crashes and fatalities in traffic crashes from 2001 through 2007 were relatively stable. In 2001, there were 37,862 fatal crashes, resulting in 42,196 deaths. In 2007, there were 37,435 fatal crashes with 41,259 deaths. 2. In contrast, the total number of traffic crashes, as estimated from GES, declined by 11%, from 6.3 million to 5.6 million. 3. Between 2007 and 2011, which was the low point in the series, the number of fatal crashes and fatalities dropped by about 20%, from 37,435 crashes and 41,259 fatalities in 2007 to 29,757 fatal crashes and 32,479 fatalities in 2011. 4. Though the patterns for fatal crashes and fatalities are very similar, their curves increasingly diverge over time, and this divergence is observed over the whole period. In addition, there was a greater drop in fatal crashes than in crashes of all severities. Changes in the volume of exposure to fatal crashes, as measured by VMT or vehicle registra- tions, were not sufficient to account for the drop in fatalities, as is clear from Figure 4-2. The fig- ure shows traffic fatalities, VMT, and vehicle registrations normalized to 2001. VMT and vehicle registrations increased steadily from 2001 to 2007, while the number of fatalities increased more slowly and tended to fluctuate slightly. VMT declined slightly from 2007 and then remained relatively constant through 2011, while traffic fatalities decreased sharply. Vehicle registrations plateaued in 2008, declined slightly to 2010, and then increased slightly. Thus, exposure, mea- sured by VMT or vehicle registrations, either declined slightly or stayed relatively flat over the period, while traffic fatalities dropped dramatically. That fatalities declined sharply while exposure remained relatively stable or declined only slightly implies that there was a change in the risk of travel. This is the necessary implication of Equation 1: Fatalities = Risk × Exposure. Figure 4-3 shows the trends in VMT, traffic fatalities, and traffic fatality rates by VMT, relative to 2001. The rate of traffic fatalities per mile traveled C H A P T E R 4 Trends in Risk and Exposure 1 In this report, all traffic crash and related statistics are derived either from the FARS or GES. See the data discussion in Chapter 5 for more information about FARS and GES.

Trends in Risk and Exposure 15 declined relative to the rates in 2001. In the period from 2001 through about 2007, the decline was gentle, reflecting the overall reduction of risk reflective of the steady pressure to increase traffic safety, i.e., the first process of the analytical approach as identified in Chapter 2. Fig- ure 4-3 shows the ratio of the rates for each year to 2001, and by 2007 the ratio for fatalities per VMT was down to 0.90. The line for normalized fatalities is shown for comparison; the ratio to 2001 remained around 1.0 through 2007, when it was 0.98, before plunging to a low of 0.77 in 2011. This suggests the second process, which is the target of the analytical approach. In contrast, VMT normalized to 2001 was 1.08 in 2007 and 1.06 in 2011. In effect, the reduction in the risk of travel pulled down the number of traffic fatalities, despite the relative stability of exposure as measured by VMT. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that the fatality risk of travel contributed to the significant decline in fatalities over the period. The decrease in exposure due to the recession and subsequent slowdown in economic activity contributed less. Figure 4-1. Trends in crashes, fatal crashes, and fatalities, 2001–2012. Figure 4-2. Trends in traffic fatalities, VMT, and vehicle registrations, 2001–2012.

16 Identification of Factors Contributing to the Decline of Traffic Fatalities in the United States from 2008 to 2012 Figure 4-3. Fatality rates by VMT and fatalities, normalized to 2001.