Claims that this-or-that highway safety program or this-or-that new idea has had a profound effect on road deaths are commonly very misleading, and a new claim from Alabama undoubtedly comes into this category.
Continue reading “Naïve or Inaccurate Claims about Road Safety Improvements do More Harm than Good”
Tag: highway
Crashes Affect More than Just the People Who are There (Video)
This excellent video from French road safety (sécurité routière) has only one slight failing. It uses the word “accident” — something that is being actively discouraged in the road safety world as providing an empty excuse that many people cling to, as in: “It wasn’t my/his/her fault, it was an accident!”
That aside, do watch this powerful and accurate video:
Around 4,000 New Yorkers are seriously injured and >250 are killed each year in traffic crashes
Lawmakers Decry Two Hit-And-Run Road Deaths in Brooklyn
…Police say that at 12:28 a.m, Saturday, Neftaly Ramirez, 27, was biking along Franklin Street in Greenpoint when he was struck by a white and green garbage truck traveling southbound on Franklin at the intersection of Noble Street. The driver, who police say worked for a private sanitation company, did not stop, and by the time police and EMS workers arrived, Ramirez was dead. The driver has not been found and the case remains under investigation.
Continue reading “Around 4,000 New Yorkers are seriously injured and >250 are killed each year in traffic crashes”
What the U.S. CDC Says about Road and Highway Crash Deaths in America
In July 2016 — with a very welcome degree of frankness and honesty that I have not seen from other top-level road safety bodies in the USA — the Center for Disease Control [CDC] wrote: “…more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes. In 2013, the US crash death rate was more than twice the average of other high-income countries… Motor vehicle crash deaths in the US are still too high. There were more than 32,000 crash deaths in the US in 2013…” [Source]
However, since the figure of 32,719 deaths for 2013 became known, the number of road deaths has catapulted upwards and the National Safety Council [NSC] now estimates that 40,200 people were killed on America’s roads in 2016, which will represent a frankly catastrophic, 23 percent increase in just three years.
Despite the CDC’s refreshing frankness, however, there was still one aspect of their associated document which, from any layman reader’s perspective, would appear to significantly play-down the scale of the situation, and this is implied in the graphic shown below.
Continue reading “What the U.S. CDC Says about Road and Highway Crash Deaths in America”