We are constantly trying to sensitize people to important issues, provide insights on fleet safety and demonstrate how to achieve lower fuel costs without necessarily relying on lower fuel prices; we advise companies to adopt sound long-term strategies and educate drivers toward more ecological and safer driving styles.
One of the stranger stories in the news lately concerns the lower fuel cost prices that the US have been experiencing of late; a fact which encourages Americans to drive more frequently which in turn, unfortunately, has led to a 7% increase in road fatalities.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which issued a communication on Aug 29th, 2015: “The nation lost 35,092 people in traffic crashes in 2015, ending a 5-decade trend of declining fatalities with a 7.2% increase in deaths from 2014. The final data released by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed traffic deaths rising across nearly every segment of the population. The last single-year increase of this magnitude was in 1966, when fatalities rose 8.1% from the previous year.”
When fuel is cheaper, Americans tend to drive more. An improving economy also naturally leads to more work-related driving, according to NHTSA. Other factors that contribute to the likelihood of a fatal traffic accident include drunk or distracted driving. Economists generally agree that low gas prices help stimulate the economy, though the modest economic growth of the last two years has led them to debate the extent of that effect. Still, an increase in traffic deaths is just one of several negative side effects. More driving also means an increase in the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change; and automobile pollution continues to be responsible for disease and death in America’s urban centres.
NHTSA and other government agencies are working on a number of programs aimed at stemming the rise in traffic deaths, such as
- releasing an open data set that contains detailed, anonymized information about each of these tragic incidents;
- sensitizing companies and organisations to do risk assessments in order to identify communities that might be at a higher risk from fatal crashes;
- using the studies of attitudes toward speeding, distracted driving, and seat belt use to better target marketing and behavioural change campaigns;
- monitoring public health indicators and behaviour risk indicators to target communities that might have a high prevalence of behaviours linked with fatal crashes (drinking, drug use/addiction, etc.).
According to many transportation experts, in the long-term self-driving cars may be the solution that can erase traffic fatalities completely.
