Road design, not car design, is more critical in preventing injuries and saving lives.
Deficient roadways are a far greater factor in vehicle safety matters than previously believed by most safety experts, according to the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), which is funded by the Transportation Construction Coalition of road builders.
The study, perhaps not coincidentally, appears as Congress is due to debate how much money is going to be spent on highway construction in future years. Highway funds–whether for new roads or maintenance–are paid for with gasoline taxes, and the trust fund that allocates the money for roads is currently bankrupt.
The study says that “deficiencies in the roadway environment” contribute to more than 22,000 fatalities and cost the nation more than $217 billion annually. The shortcomings include such items as “unforgiving” trees and light poles, dimly marked pavement, lack of rumble strips on road shoulders, lack of guardrails or safety barriers, and a paucity of signs with easy-to-read legends.
It's safe!
Titled “On a Crash Course: The Dangers and Health Costs of Deficient Roadways,” PIRE claims that the cost from bad road environments far exceeds that of alcohol abuse ($130 billion), speeding ($97 billion) and failing to wear seat belts ($60 billion).
The numbers were based on analysis of the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and state highway police agencies. The cost of deficiencies is also greater than the $59 billion the Federal Highway Administration allocates to roadway capital improvements (new roads) each year.
The comments would appear to apply largely to secondary roads, since limited-access, designed-for-high-speeds Interstate highways are known to have much lower crash and injury rates overall than other roadways.
PIRE also suggested such “more significant improvements” as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement edges and drop-offs, and “clearing more space adjacent to roadways.” The last is double-speak for cutting down killer trees. It’s long been known that rural, single-vehicle, off-the-road crashes are far over-represented in traffic safety deaths and injuries.
Dr. Jared Goldberg, a Virginia emergency room physician and PIRE researcher, said: “Recent concerns about swine flu pale in comparison to the number of crash victims I treat.”
The study’s principal author, Dr. Ted Miller, an economist, stated: “Although behavioral factors are involved in most crashes, avoiding those crashes through driver improvement requires reaching millions of individuals and getting them to sustain best safety practices. It is far more practical to make the roadway environment more forgiving and protective.”
The charge to put more emphasis on roadway improvements flies in the face of conventional wisdom that reducing drunken driving and increasing seat belt use would pay the greatest rewards in auto safety.
Of course, politicians and professional safety advocates, intertwined with the plaintiff bar, always have maintained that correcting “unsafe vehicles” through litigation, recalls and vehicle safety equipment regulation of the relative handful of car and truck manufacturers was the greatest priority.
The 10 states with the highest road-related crash costs per mile of road are California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and South Carolina.
Generally, the upper Midwest has the lowest costs. Dr. Miller believes that may be because their cities and roadways were largely constructed in the automotive age. Older, mostly eastern areas of the country by contrast, were built up in “horse-and-buggy days” when, for instance, lining a road with trees provided shade for travelers rather than hazards from motor vehicle crashes.
A typical government response to a human problem.
Why does our government feel it is their responsibility to “accident proof” our world? People will be people, laws will be broken, and no matter how many dollars we spend to make our roads safer, lives will be needlessly wasted.
As a NJ driver with over 45 years on the road I have found that speed is not the killer. Not leaving enough reaction time (tailgating) is the true culprit. We strap ourselves in, close the windows, turn up the music, and talk or text on the phone as we drive at 70 mph(on a slow day)20 feet from the rear bumper in front of us! Do you think that could cause a problem?
Drivers need to be retrained and reminded that accidents are usually caused by not being aware of your surroundings. Whether it is another vehicle, a less than perfect road surface, or an improperly maintained vehicle. Spend the money on training better drivers, not developing a rubber world and removing trees!
The report says that roads “contribute” to highway safety, and suggests that it is more efficient to address that, than to go after the behavorial factors also cited. Both are needed, of course.
Al Rusca —
Thanks for commenting on my story posted earlier today on highway safety.
You are so right about the inadequacy of driver training. I’ve been meaning to write something about it, and you’ve just given me the incentive. Stay tuned, but not in the immediate future–I have some other irons in the fire.
Mike Davis
That report is such bullshit. First of all, drunk drivers and speeding is not a condition of the road. Did the road buy a round of beers for the guy who killed my friend? No. Did the road coerce the push the pedal? No. It’s simply an element of society, and while some roads could probably be better designed (lesser lane widths, etc.) to deter speeding, it is not the road’s fault that people are assholes.
Oh, and does anybody find it funny that that writers of the report consist of a coalition of coal makers, iron workers and other unions of laborers who might benefit greatly ($$$$) from such a report?
Readers should know that the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), which commissioned this research, is not an independent organization with an unbiased interest in whether more and bigger roads get built. It consists of 27 national construction and roadway design organizations, and labor unions. This is not a bad thing, I spent 34 years helping a state DOT build roads myself. But lets not report this as independent research.
Readers should also be aware of the major assumptions made in the report.
First, by their own admission, for vehicles other than large trucks, they had no real data on whether road conditions actually contributed to the crash or not. The report is completely silent on whether this is really appropriate considering the huge difference in handling characteristics of cars versus large trucks. Second, the report admits that they do not have adequate current information on travel speeds, so assumptions were made on a small data sample from 1986.
We are being told — frightened actually — into believing that we need to ramp up our “forgiving highway” approach, straighten and widen roads or our lives will be at peril. This thinking is founded on the principle that the 85% of the road users who are currently driving within the speed limit will continue to do so once we widen and straighten our roads. Not true, most American traffic engineers will tell you. The wider and straighter the road, the faster they will go. Research not addressed in the report shows this may be okay on Interstates and Freeways, but not on our urban and suburban arterials.
The Dutch — who started a national safety program at the same time we did — recognized and addressed the role of inappropriate speeds on non freeways. If we achieved their results, 23,000 less Americans would have died last year on our roads.
This is not anti construction or to jobs. A program which rebuilds roadsides instead of clearing them saves lives and makes jobs!
Gary —
Thanks for your obviously very knowledgeable comments on my column on the subject of improving roadways to improve safety. I agree with most everything you wrote, yet I still know from more than 50 years of reporting on automotive safety that the curse of rural secondary roads is all too often old design, simply paving over a one-time wagon road. It is true that some [stupid] drivers undoubtedly would use better roads to generate higher speeds. Still, I think we need to think about “killer trees” and ditches with concrete abutment too close to the roadway, equally deadly in those off-the-road crashes, especially for drivers (often DUI) who go to sleep–and their passengers. There’s no easy solution, because it costs real money which these days is in demand simply for maintenance of 40-50 year old interstates. And meanwhile gas tax revenues are down because of less driving and more fuel-efficient vehicles. I’d welcome any further comments you have.
Mike Davis