Good News, Bad News for 2018 Road Fatalities
Driver and passengers deaths fell, but pedestrian and cyclist deaths rose
Photo: Sporti
The NHTSA’s annual tally of accidental deaths on the road comes with both good news and bad news for the safety of the nation’s drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
The big positive is a decline in motor-vehicle accident deaths for 2018. A total of 36,560 people died in a crash — a 2 percent drop compared to 2017. Motorcyclist deaths fell 5 percent to 4,985.
In other welcome news, even though Americans’ cumulative driving distance for the year rose to 3.2 billion miles, there were only 1.1 deaths for every 100 million miles driven, a decline of 3 percent.
The NHTSA notes that almost half of the people who died in 2018 motor-vehicle accidents were not wearing seat belts.
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Photo: Kaique Rocha
Unfortunately, annual statistics were much worse for pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. Pedestrian deaths rose by 3 percent to 6,283. Cyclist deaths rose by 6 percent to 857. Both of these numbers are the highest since 1990.
To combat increasing pedestrian and cyclist deaths, the NHTSA wants to change its crash-test standards to include a category for pedestrian impacts. This proposal could go public next year and would include testing standards for systems like emergency braking and pedestrian detection.
Overall, America’s 2018 accident deaths occurred at a rate of 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2018. That’s not good, especially when compared with a country like Japan (4.7 per 100,000). However, it’s far better than China and Russia, where the death rate is almost 19 per 100,000, or Brazil and many other countries where rates are even worse.
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News Source: Car and Driver
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