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For a long time, the trend was down. Things were getting safer, and the number of bodies dead on the streets declined nearly every year.
But during the pandemic something broke. In 2020, the rate suddenly spiked upwards. Many explanations were given, some more convincing than others. But most people expected things to return to the previous downward trend. The thing is... they haven't. The rate of people killed each year has remained at levels not seen for decades.
I'm talking, of course, about the rate of fatal auto accidents.
In 2019, the U.S. death rate per 100 million vehicles miles reached an all-time low of 1.10. But in 2020, it skyrocketed by over 20% to 1.34. This was by far the largest annual increase ever. In 2021, the rate increased slightly to 1.37 and then in 2022 it moderated to 1.35.
It's not just the rate that's increased either. The absolute number of deaths is up a lot. There are 6,000 excess deaths per year over the 2019 level.
The cope for the 2020 uptick was that, with highways empty, people built up greater speeds leading to more deaths. This might explain 2020 but certainly can't explain the 2022 data when highways had returned to parking lots speeds. Never mind that every year the rate should be going DOWN as older cars are replaced with newer, safer ones.
A decline in policing might be at least partially responsible. The overburdened police in my home city of Seattle no longer enforce traffic rules, for example. Predictably, Seattle's proposed solution to increased deaths is to install a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws. For those who steal cars, or drive drunk, or refuse to get a license, or don't get insurance, or refuse to pay citations, the penalty will remain the same: nothing. The police isn't allowed to chase criminals even if it wants to.
Are these misguided rules the reason for the uptick in deaths? I'm not sure. I've heard that nearby conservative areas have also seen an increase in death rates. I think it's more likely that this is simply evidence of the U.S. becoming a more low-trust society. People in low-trust societies in Latin America and Africa drive like maniacs. People in high-trust societies in Europe drive safely. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle but slouching lower.
I'd be interested in better numbers on the number of licensed drivers. The absolute number of licenses per individual have been ticking up. But some of these statistics... Well, it's easy to count the absolute number of registered licenses, but people can technically drive without a valid license, and people can also have licenses in multiple states.
Now, according to the numbers I have, the number of licenses has been ticking up. And the number of licenses per capita has been ticking up. From .89 in 2020 to .91 in 2024...
Now naively, increasing the number of drivers shouldn't change that deaths/hundred thousand miles number- but when you already have 90% of people driving, 1 more percentage point probably doesn't represent the best drivers getting licenses. The more separated society is, the less public transit there is, the more people are forced to drive to work to survive, the worse the bottom of the bell curve of drivers on the streets is going to look. I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.
This is all just a hypothesis though. Really I'd want a curated regional dataset of accidents with information about when those involved got their licenses. Without that it's hard to correlate. It's likely the accidents aren't uniformly increasing, but are localized to some areas more than others. All in all, a better dataset would let us make much better hypotheses.
Isn't this all pretty marginal stuff? How could it explain a > 20% increase in a single year? In recent decades, the rate decreased smoothly, and almost every year until 2020, and then bam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
Maybe, maybe not. I'm skeptical of my own hypothesis without more numbers. But if a bunch of high risk drivers started driving again circa Covid, who were previously getting around in other ways (because they know they're bad at driving), we would expect those people to get into a disproportionate number of accidents per mile driven.
These 1-2% licensing numbers are probably the wrong ones to look at for this hypothesis though. What we really want is the number of infrequent drivers that became more frequent drivers. Or better yet, miles driven sorted by driver insurance risk profile. These people may have largely already had licenses.
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