More than one in four fatal crashes in the United States now involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year – in addition to an unknown number of injuries. Clearly, speeding is now a national health problem and a big reason why the United States is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety throughout the developed world.
It is hard to prove that crashes are more common when speed goes up, but they certainly are more severe. Thousands of car crash victims are on foot or on a bicycle and speed is even more a crucial determinate of whether they live or die.
The numbers say it all: a pedestrian hit by a vehicle has a 10% chance of dying at 23 MPH. Meanwhile, at 50 MPT, the chance of dying rises to 75%. Last year, when the pandemic shut down the country, vehicle miles travelled (VMT) reduced by 13%, but the per mile death rate increased by 24%. This increase in death rate was the greatest increase in the United States in the last 100 years.
And the news just keeps getting worse. In the first six months of 2021, fatalities rose by 18%, which was the largest increase since the U.S. DOT started counting.
It appears that the nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is too low on interstate highways and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets. The cost to our nation is enormous. The lack of political will to do something about it is mindboggling. But we keep electing the same type of folks locally and nationally. One would think that this type of social problem would be important to the majority of elected officials.
The national Vision Zero program should be adopted by each community. But, without money and political will, it will go nowhere. Don’t get me wrong, there are many communities that have adopted Vision Zero programs, but not enough. What would happen if an elected leader’s family member or friend was killed in a crash? That would get their attention, unfortunately.
What can be done? Enter automated traffic enforcement, commonly known as speed cameras, which can reduce encounters between citizens and the police, target extreme speeders, and discourage bad driving.
The worlds most developed speed camera network can be found in New York City. While cameras only issue tickets to drivers going more than 10 MPH over the speed limit, a pilot of 140 cameras installed around city schools in 2014 reduced speeding during school hours by 63% and injuries by 14%. After an expansion in New York City in 2019 to 750 schools, the cameras, which operate between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., reduce speeding on an average by 72%.
New York’s speed camera program shows one avenue that state and local government agencies could take to curb speeding and reduce fatalities. Just imagine if this was instituted in more cities and counties across the U.S.