Study: The Missing Ingredient in the Fight To End Car Crash Deaths is… Fewer Cars

Communities that drive less and have more mobility also have fewer deadly crashes, a new study confirms — so why is reducing auto travel so rarely discussed as a life-saving strategy in its own right, never mind leveraged when governments attempt to slash transit funding?

In a fascinating recent study, researchers found that states whose residents drove more miles on average also reported more crashes on average — at least when states recorded those stats on a per capita basis, rather than the misleading per-mile basis on which many US transportation officials rely.

Wyoming, for instance, recorded both the highest average fatality rate across modes and the highest average driving mileage, while New York reported the lowest on both counts.

That finding might seem intuitive to street safety advocates, or anyone who’s taken a vacation to car-light places like Denmark. But when you think about it, it’s weird how little safety leaders tend to talk about reducing car dependency specifically as a tool to save lives — and how infrequently attacks on funding for transit service are received by the public as acts of premeditated road violence.

“I think Safe Systems is great, and we’ve made a lot of progress on road safety over the last couple decades — but in the U.S., we’ve stagnated a little bit,” said Nick Ferenchak, a professor at University of New Mexico and co-author of the paper. “To me, the elephant in the room is that a lot of our places are pretty auto-dependent … [If we have] more driving, we’re going to get more car crashes, and we really need to have a conversation about that.”

Ferenchak’s co-author, Todd Litman, explains that many transportation officials are hesitant — likely for political reasons — to acknowledge that cars are the only common denominator in all car crashes, and prefer to focus on stamping out extra-dangerous “outlier” driving behaviors instead.

“The standard transportation engineering narrative is that driving is not inherently dangerous, so traffic safety programs should be targeted [to] youths and drunks and bad actors,” he added. “The unstated assumption is that reducing driving is so onerous that it would be unfair to force responsible [motorists] to reduce their driving just because of the risks [imposed by] an irresponsible minority.”

But those bad apples tend to stay in the barrel if they don’t have any place else to go. Less-deadly drivers, meanwhile, are human beings who make mistakes too — and because a fallible human being piloting a multi-ton, ultra-fast hunk of metal is inherently dangerous, those mistakes often cost lives.

In car-dominated communities, though, most residents lack a good bus route or bike path to take instead, so they remain firmly behind the wheel. In each of the 20 most dangerous states on the researchers’ list, average annual per capita vehicle miles traveled topped 10,000.

“We have graduated licenses; we have special testing for seniors; we have anti-drunk driving and anti-impaired driving campaigns,” Litman adds. “But if we don’t invest in good alternatives? Those fail.”

While the researchers hesitate to say that reducing driving outright causes crash deaths to plummet on roads, they do say there’s enough evidence of a strong correlation to empower transportation officials to change how they operate. Because at the end of the day, making driving non-mandatory doesn’t mean banishing all cars from the face of the earth — and it may actually make motoring better.

“New policy should be to make more [travel] possible through safe and practical alternatives,” said Abbas Sheykhfard, who also co-authored the study. “These changes may reduce driving exposure across the system while preserving access and other facilities for people who want to continue to drive.”

More to the point, it won’t take many car-limiting policies to get America a lot closer to Vision Zero.

“The travel behavior shifts to improve safety outcomes would be pretty modest,” added Ferenchak. “We’re not talking about turning the entire USA into Utrecht. Just 10 to 15 percent reductions in car-orientation, and our [road safety] outcomes are on par with some of our international peers.”

The researchers acknowledge that in many US communities, it’d be political suicide to embrace full-on VMT reduction targets – even if evidence suggests that doing so might save lives, at least in the context of shifting public dollars away from highways and towards great multimodal options.

Still, transportation officials could internally score proposed “safety” projects more highly if they also reduce overall driving — or at the very least promote the life-saving potential of projects that happen to shift people onto other modes, even if that’s not why they were initially launched. Litman offers increasing fuel taxes to stabilize budgets and walk-to-school programs to promote student health as two examples of powerful safety strategies that aren’t usually sold as such.

And by contrast, as lawmakers in Washington take aim at federal transit funding and smear anything that even remotely smacks of “green,” he says it’s more important than ever to call out how axing mode shift strategies will cost real lives.

“Any politician that calls themselves conservative should support win-win safety strategies because they deliver so much value,” Litman added. “I understand how these issues have become so ideologically weaponized. But if there is a true conservative out there, they should be very interested in this research.”