Traffic Fatality Rates

According to the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration s Motor Vehicle Safety 1979 the contribution of national policy to traffic safety is substantial. 

The Federal safety standards and programs for highway and motor vehicle safety that have been instituted since 1966 have combined to reduce the fatality rate (number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven) by 39 percent. In other words, a motorist today can drive more than 1,600 miles with the same degree of risk as someone who drove 1,000 miles in 1966. This improvement has come about despite large increases in traffic that could have sent the death rate higher—registered motor vehicles up 67 percent licensed drivers up 42 percent and vehicle miles driven up 65 percent.  

The message is clear traffic safety policy has produced a sizable reduction in the risk of fatal accident despite the adverse effects of some demographic and economic trends. 

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Silvak, M., (1983). Society s aggression level as a predictor of traffic fatality rate. Journal of Safety Research 14, pp. 93-99. 

An American study published in 2002 reported that car-occupant seatbelt usage, as determined by roadside surveys, had risen from a low of 10% (in 1985 in Indiana) to a high of 87% (in 1996 in California), but did not find this to have had the effect of reducing the traffic fatality rate per head of population across as many as 14 years of data (Derrig et al., 2002). 

Jamroz K. (2012) The impact of road network structure and mobility on the national traffic fatality rate. EWGT 2012. 15th meeting of the EURO Working Group on Transportation. Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 54 (2012) pp. 1370-1377. www. elsevier.com/locate/procedia. 

FATALR j—traffic fatality rate in an i-th region in j-th year... 

Peltzman s article has been criticized on a number of counts, primarily statistical but it did stimulate follow-up investigations. Dr. John Adams of University College, London, UK, for example, compared traffic fatality rates between countries with and without safety-belt use laws. His annual comparisons (from 1970 to 1978) showed dramatic reductions in fatal vehicle crash rates after countries introduced seat-belt use laws. Taken alone this data would lend strong support to seat-belt legislation. But the drop in fatality rates was even greater in countries without safety-belt use laws (Adams, 1985b). Apparently, the large-scale impact of increased use of vehicle safety belts has not been nearly as beneficial as expected from laboratory crash tests. Risk compensation has been proposed to explain this discrepancy. 

Sam Peltzman s methodological approach differs from the technological approach in that he focuses on human behavior especially driver choice. He begins with an individual benefit-cost framework to traffic safety and combines with it findings from other safety studies to construct counterfactual estimates of traffic fatality rates, hypothetical rates which would have occurred without a national traffic safety policy. We will examine his study in some detail because most of the studies are similar m crucial aspects and hence we can examine other studies more quickly. Peltzman s study is pivotal in that it was one of the first comprehensive evaluative studies. It reintroduced human behavior into traffic safety thinking. 

IMPACT OF VEHICLE SAFETY STANDARDS ON TRAFFIC FATALITY RATES AND LIVES SAVED... 

William Niskanen pointed out to me that the fatality rate as measured by traffic fatalities per 100 thousand population reflects a trend which is quite different from the vehicle mile rate. As shown in Table 3 in Chapter 1 the population traffic fatality rate fluctuates from year to year, but does not decline on average. It changes little from 22.8 in 1947 to 20.8 in 1961. The rate be ns to increase in 1%1, reaches a maximum of about 27 and stays at 27 until 1973. It then falls unsteadily to about 22 which is almost the same as the 1947 rate. ( )... 

More comprehensive analysis of traffic safety measures should be done. The key variables should be traffic fatalities, the traffic fatality rates and the analysis should be based on a general individual net benefit type of framework. Econometric and statistical time series models should be emphasized so as to facilitate bottom line analysis of fatality rates. Bottom line analysis is essential to a better understanding of determinants of traffic safety and taking some of the mystery out of mystery plunges. Bottom-line evaluation is essential to overall evaluation of traffic safety policy. Bottom line evaluation provides additional information on interactions within the traffic safety system. These interactions are difficult to incorporate precisely in anal is of polity measures evaluated one at a time. 

Table 3.3 shows the estimated deaths (from road crashes) per 100,000 population experienced in the various WHO regions of the world in 2008. We can readily see that, on average, low-income and middle-income countries have around twice the road traffic fatality rates of high-income countries. 

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