Despite the drop in traffic throughout 2020 and the pandemic, the number of deaths related to motor vehicle traffic rose 7.2% —the highest it had been since 2007— compared to 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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According to the NHTSA, it is estimated that 38,680 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2020. While at the same daily personal car trips plunged 45% and traffic altogether remained lower than 2019 throughout the year.
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One reason experts believe the number of deaths has gone up is the number of people driving recklessly with fewer people on the road.
“It’s counterintuitive to see the rate of traffic deaths spike when so many of us were driving less often,” Jake Nelson, AAA’s director of traffic safety advocacy, said in a press release. “As the U.S. climbs out of the COVID-19 pandemic, highway safety officials will need to double down on curbing speeding, substance-impaired driving, and failure to buckle up.”
Due to little traffic, more people took the wheel while intoxicated or drove recklessly, thinking they would be safer with fewer people on the road.
AAA has been examining the impacts of the pandemic and associated restrictions on the drastic drop in U.S. road travel.
The company found that daily trips fell from an average of 3.7 in 2019 to 2.2 in April 2020. The numbers did recover slightly but remained low throughout the rest of the year, at 20%-25% below their 2019 levels during the second half of 2020.
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The remainder of the study also found that travel by transit, taxi, or rideshare fell by 5.5% from pre-pandemic numbers to 1.7% in April 2020. In addition, commuter travel for work-related reasons dropped by 40% in April, and it returned to around 26% for the remainder of the year.
With travel returning to normal, gas prices have also started to rise, with it now almost a dollar over what the fossil fuel cost last year at this time.