The latest accounting of carnage on the nation's highways should be setting off alarms and causing greater investment in safer modes of travel. U.S. highway fatalities rose to 35,092 in 2015, according to the latest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration accounting released in August, a 7.2 percent increase from the year before and the biggest jump in 50 years.
Experts have offered any number of explanations for this, from lower gasoline prices and more congested roads to distracted drivers in the smartphone era, as well as the usual culprits, speeding and drunk driving. But what makes the trend especially troubling is that federal and state authorities have been working on this problem for decades-cars have more safety features, EMT workers and hospital emergency rooms are better equipped for trauma patients and roads are better and more safely designed than ever before.
But what if the central problem is that Americans are simply too car dependent? What if the best way to reduce fatal collisions was not to get in a car in the first place? What if people were offered a convenient, safer alternative?
Those very questions are raised by a recent report, "The Hidden Traffic Safety Solution: Public Transportation," that found that Americans can reduce their risk of being in an accident by 90 percent simply by taking mass transit rather than getting in a car. Transit-oriented communities are essentially five times safer than other neighborhoods, the authors found, because of a much-lower per capita traffic casualty rate.
The report, prepared for the American Public Transportation Association, notes that people don't necessarily have to take transit each day to receive some benefit from this phenomenon. Cities where residents make 50 or more transit trips each year have 50 percent fewer traffic fatalities than cities where residents use transit for 20 trips or fewer. That's a modest difference in transit usage, given that most people average 1,350 trips of any kind in a year, but it yields a major benefit.
The findings should come as no surprise given that buses, trains, subways and other modes of public transit have always had much lower accident rates than cars. What's more surprising is that manner in which the public has become inured to highway fatalities. If the deadly crashes continue to climb at their current rate, they could surpass suicide to become the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S.
That should have Americans clamoring for action. Yet the federal government has, if anything, retreated in its support of mass transit. APTA estimates that the backlog of repair needs for various transit systems now tops $86 billion.
Yet safety is only one of the benefits of transit. It's less polluting and more energy efficient as well. It promotes economic development and community revitalization. And younger workers often prefer transit to driving.
Obviously, the country needs safer roads, but the failure to invest sufficiently in public transit is more than just bad planning-it's bound to cost lives.