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August 23, 2006
SAFER VEHICLES CREDITED WITH DEATH-RATE DROPS
A new IIHS study concludes that without vehicle safety performance improvements, introduced largely as a result of Federal regulation over recent decades, the motor vehicle death rate per registered vehicle would have stopped declining in 1994 and started going up.
"Death rates per vehicle and per mile have been going down for decades, and they still are. This study shows why," says Institute president Adrian Lund, a coauthor of the study, "Trends Over Time In the Risk of Driver Death".
"In recent years it's the vehicles, not better drivers or improved roadways. The study reveals not only the importance of the vehicle design changes and the kinds of vehicles motorists are choosing to drive but, on the downside, the loss of momentum for effective traffic safety policies on belt use, alcohol-impaired driving, and speeding."
Motor vehicles meeting higher safety performance criteria have been increasing on U.S. highways since the early 1970s, largely as a result of Federal motor vehicle safety standards. IIHS researchers separated vehicle effects from other effects on motor vehicle death rates during 1985-2004 by estimating what the death rate trend would have been if vehicle designs hadn't changed over the years — that is, if people still were driving the kinds of vehicles they drove in 1985. IIHS said the death rate trend given this hypothetical vehicle fleet started to go up in the 1990s, which is very different from the actual downward trend during the past 10 years, suggesting that
"an increasingly dangerous traffic environment has been offset since 1994 only because people are driving vehicles that are more protective… Of course the vehicle design changes are good, but people shouldn't have to buy new, more crashworthy vehicles to maintain their safety. Our concern is that the efforts we had been seeing in the 1980s to mandate belt use and toughen DWI laws diminished in the 1990s at the same time that states were raising speed limits. This produced an increasingly dangerous traffic environment. It has become dangerous enough that, without the design improvements that have made vehicles more crashworthy, death rates would have started up. An estimated 5,200 additional lives would have been lost in 2004 without the vehicle design changes."
Posted by MVHAP at August 23, 2006 09:50 PM