The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported a 3.8% drop in road fatalities for 2024, with 39,345 lives lost. Factors leading to increased road deaths during the pandemic included speeding on empty roads and lack of law enforcement. Despite this decline, certain states contributed to rising fatalities, challenging the effectiveness of local "Vision Zero" initiatives. Overall, while road safety appears to improve, it still falls short of the safer conditions observed in 2019, highlighting a pressing need for continued efforts toward public safety on the roads.
A rare spot of good news today: For the second year in a row, US roads got a little safer. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published its early estimate of road deaths in 2024; 39,345 people lost their lives, which is a 3.8 percent decrease from the 40,901 deaths that occurred on US roads in 2023.
There's no single cause, and studies have identified multiple contributing factors: empty roads designed to practically encourage speeding... a general sense of fatalism in the face of public health restrictions...
NHTSA has completed its final analysis of fatal crashes in 2023 and says that the rate of deaths fell by 6 percent, to 1.26 per 100 million miles traveled.
As ever, though, the gains are far from uniform, and a handful of states continue to account for an oversized share of the carnage. Fourteen states plus the District of Columbia saw road deaths increase in 2024.
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