New Road Safety Report Reveals Some Concerning Trends
Each year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration releases data on all the car crashes that happened in the prior year. These statistics take some time to analyze, but they provide a lot of valuable insight into traffic safety trends. The final numbers for 2021 are in, and they provide valuable information about how the pandemic affected drivers.2021 Statistics Show an Increase in Fatalities
After carefully analyzing national traffic reports for a year, the NHTSA has released extensive data on 2021 road accidents. This finalized car crash data reveals that there has been an unusually high increase in traffic fatalities. Overall, car crash deaths were up 10.5% from 2020. There were especially high rates of pedestrian deaths, which increased by 13% overall. Of course, some of this increase is due to the fact that fewer people were driving during the early months of the pandemic. Since road accidents were significantly lower in 2020, the rate of increase is partially because more drivers were back on the road and making mistakes. However, even when accounting for the unusually low number of fatalities in 2020, 2021 had a shockingly high number of fatal accidents. There were 42,939 car accident fatalities in 2021, which is the highest number of traffic deaths since 2005. The NHTSA data also shows that drivers and passengers in 2021 had a much higher risk of being killed in an accident. In 2019, there were 1.11 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. This rate increased to 1.34 in 2020 and 1.37 in 2021.
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