What’s the Cause?
A Vox article asked, why are fewer people dying in car crashes? Their answers said drunk drivers were killing fewer people, more people were wearing seat belts and we’ve been driving less since 2005. Looking into it further, the rise and fall of gas prices and the shifting economy have become factors across the nation impacting millions of people.
More recently, car designs have begun to view their audiences a little differently, with new Best picks for Top Safety and Family Car categories for the year. Looking towards a future with self-driving cars, we’ve made large advances within the automobile industry. With forward-collision warnings, automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection, lane departure warnings, blind spot warnings, rear cross-traffic warnings, and lane-centering assist to name a few, it’s no wonder human mistakes are being prevented.
Similarly, in 2012, a New York Times article wrote that fewer teenagers are driving after drinking. Just a year later, a different article had written that for young drivers, drinking was more dangerous. In both articles, numerous statistics are given as the writers report that fewer drunk drivers are reported due to tougher laws and a lowered legal limit. Another factor, they add is that high school students may be driving less because of the higher gas prices and the slowdown of the economy. The interactive data visualization in the 2013 article shows the number of crashes based on the age of drivers or by the time of the crash. It points out that in all fatal accidents involving alcohol, 48% of drivers had a blood-alcohol level higher than 0.16 percent. “The National Transportation Safety Board recently recommended that states lower the current blood-alcohol limit of 0.08 percent to 0.05 percent. Fatal accidents involving drivers who have been drinking — even those with low blood-alcohol levels — vary sharply depending on a driver’s age and the time of day.” Through this visualization, the article was able to propose a lowered legal limit writing, “The chart here reveals that the red “hot spots” start with young drivers at even the lowest blood alcohol levels, and decline as drivers get older. If the proposed legislation is adopted by the states, young drivers and their passengers may be the biggest winners.”
If you look up recent articles around the topics of safer cars and fatality rates show the opposite effect. CNN’s article from 2017 stated that “American drivers are apparently getting the message not to drive and text — or drive and do other things on their smartphones. Fatalities attributed to distracted driving fell by 2.2%. Drivers being drowsy or falling asleep also decreased as a cause of fatal accidents. But there’s a lot of existing problems that are getting worse and killing a lot of people. Drunk driving fatalities rose 1.7% to 10,497. They account for more than one out of every four traffic deaths. Those attributed to speeding increased 4% to 10,111. Fatalities attributed to not wearing a seat belt increased by 4.6%.”
So who’s telling the truth? Is there a true correlation between safe cars and fewer fatalities? What about between drunk driving and fewer fatalities? Looking at additional data from the catalog U.S. General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, their dataset, Occupant and Alcohol-Impaired Driving Deaths in States, 2003–2012 organizes the number of fatalities by state and was last updated February 28, 2019.
Looking into the dataset, we get two different lines- occupant death and alcohol-impaired driving deaths, with occupant deaths considered anything but alcohol-impaired driving.
Graphing this out, we can observe that over time, both lines have increased. There is no time in which the alcohol-impaired driving deaths take over the occupant deaths, meaning it’s not the leading cause of death or car accidents, however, both lines see sharp increases at times as they follow each other pretty similarly.
This may mean that both arguments have a very valid point- drunk driving has gone down, but occasionally spikes. As mentioned before, the shifting gas prices and the rise and fall of the economy may have a bit to do with who is on the roads and who owns a car.
For additional data, let’s split out this data a bit more.
Here, we’re able to see the total number of occupant deaths within each state, with California being the second highest, and Texas being the highest. To add, we can also look at the number of alcohol-impaired deaths:
The two graphs look pretty similar and are mostly out of curiosity to see which states have the most and least amount of occupant deaths and alcohol-impaired driving deaths. Regardless, both are highly correlated to each other, proving our earlier point that drunk drivers are no longer the main cause of fatal car accidents, but do contribute a high amount of fatalities.
Of course, human error is not always easy to account for, but accounting for a few factors may help us understand what is currently causing the most accidents and how to prevent them. For future research, it’d be intriguing to look into new distraction-free driving apps that can help you be more aware of your actions on the road. Additionally, insurance rates for younger drivers have increased, but have also created their own ways of limiting what they can do to be safer on the roads.
