Category: Traffic Safety

In the past few days, the nanny-state, safety-theater goons have influenced the newspapers with creative spin on recent road safety statistics. The headlines alert us that that roadway deaths are at their highest levels in 15 years, implying we have dangerous highways that need urgent solutions!

That is hogwash.

It is true that highway deaths increased 1.4% in 2005, the most recent available year. If I left it at that, you might believe that we’re reversing decades-old safety trends. Here’s why that is a faulty conclusion.

Cannot Ignore Exposure

If you spend 1 hour in 0 degree weather, you have a higher chance of suffering hypothermia than if you spend 1 minute in it. Increased exposure to cold increases your likelihood of hypothermia. Likewise, if you drive 100 miles each day, you have a higher likelihood of being involved in a crash than if you drive 1 mile. Your increased mileage exposed you to more risk.

Aggregate that to a national scale: if all the drivers in a nation drive more miles each year, then the nation as a whole have experience more deaths, not because each driver is more dangerous, but because the nation has increased its exposure to risk.

The total death count by itself does not shed much light on the total safety picture. You must to scale the death count by risk exposure–miles driven.

Go back to that hypothermia example. Suppose we do a larger experiment. On day 1, 10 people go outside for 1 hour in the 0 degree weather, and one person gets hypothermia. You might infer that each individual has a 10% chance of getting hypothermia.

Suppose we repeat the same experiment with 50 people, and 4 people get hypothermia. The chance of any individual getting hypothermia decreased by 20%! How could that be? Didn’t hypothermia cases quadruple? In fact, the risk–that is, the number of people in the cold–increased fivefold. That is a much larger increase than the increase in actual cases of hypothermia.

Similarly, if risk–miles driven–increases more rapidly than total deaths, then your roads are actually safer, despite the increased death count, because the chance of any individual dying on the road is decreasing!

The Nitty Gritty

From 1995 through 2005, the number of vehicle miles driven annually (VMT) has risen by an average 2.1%. However, over that same time period, the total death count has risen by an annual 0.6%. This suggests that the death rate is decreasing. Our highways have been getting safer despite the increased death count! Here is a chart comparing deaths to vehicle miles traveled since 1966, with trend lines to show the long-term trends:

Clearly, the VMT count is rising much more quickly than the death count.

From 1995 through 2005, the death rate decreased by an average of 1.5% per year. It decreased every year except for 2005. Is 2005’s number alarming? I say no.

In 1995, the death rate was 1.73 deaths per hundred million miles traveled. In 2005, the death rate was 1.47. That’s a 15% decrease!

Digging a little further into the statistics shows a smoking gun.

Blame Motorcyclists

The yearly death count for motorcyclists has skyrocketed. In fact, on average, motorcyclist deaths have increased about 40 times faster than passenger vehicles every year from 1997 through 2005. Here’s a chart:

What’s going on? Two things: there are many more motorcycles on the roads than before, and most states’ helmet laws have been repealed in the past 10 years. Today, only 20 states have full motorcycle helmet laws.

What would happen if motorcycle death increases equaled instead of grossly outpaced passenger vehicle death count increases? Here’s how the numbers would change if we used an adjusted death count:

• The adjusted 2005 death rate would be only 1.39, which would mean a one third increase in the death rate reduction from 2005.
• The adjusted 2005 death rate would only be 0.1% higher than the adjusted 2004 rate.

Perspective

Road safety nanny state types nostalgically look back on the days of the old national 55 mph limit. Look at this chart, showing actual death rates against time:

Notice how roads today are substantially safer today than in ’74, when the 55 mph limit started? (This is a separate point deserving more research, but also notice how the death rate flattened–didn’t meaningfully improve–in the 8 years following the 55 mph limit and actually turned back the excellent safety improvement record from 1966-1973? Is this causation or correlation?)

Also note how we are starting to hit against the law of diminishing returns: the closer the death rate gets to 0, the more difficult it becomes to further reduce the rate using the same techniques.

Lesson Learned?

While there was a setback in traffic safety in 2005, it was miniscule, and its is likely to be mostly correlated with motorcycle deaths.

No deaths are good deaths. Ideally, no traffic deaths should happen. But painting a picture of doom and gloom with silly statements that castigate all drivers focuses energies on unproductive measures like low speed limits.

Data Sources

My data came from two NHTSA sources: the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and Traffic Safety Facts 1997. Here’s the spreadsheet where I crunched my data.

A persistent myth is that Texas Department of Public Safety Highway Patrol cops don’t arrest (pull over) motorists for less than 10 over the speed limit. It’s false, and I have three cases in point to prove it. Note that in each case, I was the passenger.

October 1995: Driver got pulled over and ticketed by TxDPS on I-45 in the middle of nowhere for doing 74 in a 65. (This was a couple of months before the statutory rural limit went to 70 mph.)

June 1996: Driver got pulled over by TxDPS on FM 217 headed eastbound into Palo Duro State Park for doing 77 in a 70. Fortunately, the driver got a warning, but I’ll bet it’s because of the clerical collar he wore when taking his driver’s license photo. (It’s a legit; he is really ordained clergy.)

Typical rural Texas speed limit sign with the goofball night speed limit.

April 2006: Driver got pulled over by TxDPS and ticketed for doing 74 in a 65. This one is particularly egregious. Texas has a goofy 65 mph night speed limit that takes effect 30 minutes after sunset. This guy wrote the ticket at 8:57 PM, a mere 9 minutes after the 65 went into effect. (9 minutes earlier was “30 minutes after sunset” on that day, so the driver would have been doing 74 in a 70, an unlikely ticket.) Furthermore, he strictly enforced this arbitrary limit (arbitrary meaning it was set by politicians in the 1963 Texas Legislature, not by a traffic engineer) on a deserted stretch of 4 lane, almost perfectly flat, median-separated US 67 east of San Angelo. (Maybe 2 cars passed during the entire about 10 minute traffic stop?) To top it off, the cop felt the need to remind the car’s occupants that “I am the law and you are nothing” with a gruff and unfriendly demeanor. Just think how you would have felt with this gruff guy blaring his flashlight in your face at 8:57 PM in the middle of nowhere. He came across as a young punk just trying to fill a quota. Heaven forbid anyone do 74 on a very good road in the middle of nowhere!

Not all cops are as hard assed as this. In another case, I know of someone who was pulled over by TxDPS for 91 in a 70 on I-20 east of Abilene. (This guy admits that he was knowingly doing 91.) The guy was polite, and the trooper wrote the ticket for 81 in a 70.

I have been pulled over five times in my life but have only received one ticket. The one ticket was from the only time I was pulled over by a TxDPS officer, and it was for, you guessed it, speeding. The four times I didn’t get a ticket are:

• 1995: Harris County Precinct 2 Constable pulled me over for illegal right turn. (I should have turned into the rightmost lane but unthinkingly turned into the next lane over.) The illegal turn was just a pretense for pulling me over to see why I was driving through South Bend, an at-the-time almost deserted neighborhood that was cleared out because of its proximity to the BRIO toxic waste site. This neighborhood had a lot of theft problems, and it didn’t help that my ’74 Nova looked quite ratty at the time.
• 1998 (?): Pulled over by an SMU cop, although the reason was bogus. He said I ran a stop sign when in fact I had been stopped at the stop sign for a few seconds waiting for a pedestrian to pass by. (It’s actually a two-part intersection, and I think he may have thought there was a stop sign at the second part when there wasn’t.) He also accused me of speeding, but SMU cops do not have radar guns or any other speed detection equipment, and he wasn’t pacing me, so I don’t know where he got that from.
• 2001: Pulled over by Highland Park Police. Highland Park is an enclave city inside of Dallas. It does everything within its powers to discourage through traffic by clogging its thoroughfares. In particular, Highland Park forces drivers to engage in technically illegal maneuvers to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. In my case, I was approaching a street where I needed to make a left turn. There is a bizarrely short left turn lane at this signal. Most motorists partially cut over a double yellow line to pass several cars that are always stacked up at the signal to get into the left turn lane. That way you can make the left turn at the next green instead of waiting for two cycles–one cycle to approach the signal and get into the left turn lane, and another cycle to actually get a left turn signal. (Cities without such anti-motorist mindsets would have made the left turn lane much longer or used a “suicide lane.”) I did this maneuver, and the Highland Park cop pulled me over immediately. Once he saw that my driver’s license said I lived in University Park (I was renting a house from SMU at the time), his stated reason for pulling me over was that my inspection sticker looked funny–totally bogus because there’s no way he could have seen it from where he was waiting. Anyway, it seem that if you live in either Park city, you get a free pass on traffic laws. I wasn’t ticketed. He just said I need to fix my sagging inspection sticker.
• 
  The bumper sticker that may have helped get me out of a ticket.

  2002: Pulled over by a Hancock County, IL sheriff’s deputy. He said I was doing 55 in a 45. It wouldn’t surprise me if I really was doing that. One reason is that my ’74 Nova’s speedometer was acting up, and being over 700 miles from home, there’s no way I could fix it in a hurry. The other reason is that I am used to Texas’s speed laws, where in many but not all cases the speed limit rises as the need for lower speeds diminishes. Illinois is different: the speed limit can stay arbitrarily low all the way to the city limit sign even if the city limits extend well into undeveloped areas. On this road, IL 96, the speed limit stayed 45 well past any practical indication that you were within the Nauvoo city limits. I was pulled over right before the 55 mph speed zone started, and the road was deserted and obviously rural. The deputy let me go with only a verbal warning to drive carefully. He said he liked my “FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS VOTE DEMOCRAT” bumper sticker.

This is a better idea than blindly assuming that TxDPS gives motorists a lot of leeway.

A recent TxDPS traffic stop document showed that nearly half of all TxDPS citations are speeding citations. While it may seem surprising that such an enormous number of violations are so narrowly focused on only one of many types of moving violations, this is apparently common practice. Numbers for Houston and Austin suggest their cops also use about half their moving violation traffic tickets on speeding.

So what is the grand summary? It may pay to use a good radar detector. Even better, you don’t need to shell out a lot to get a good detector. The BEL Express 795, $80 at Circuit City, appears to do about as well as $300+ detectors.

Even though Texas’s new 80 mph speed limit signs have been up for 6 days, my repeated searches haven’t turned up a single photo on the internet. Today, I emailed a staffer in the office of Pete Gallego, the Texas Legislator whose bill allowed these speed limits, and got the photos. I present you the first known online photos of Texas’s 80 mph speed limit!

They are apparently of Gallego unveiling a new 80 mph speed limit sign near Fort Stockton, Texas. (Location assumed from a prior news article, not the words of the staffer.)

This is proof that democrats are occasionally able to do good things.

By the way, you may have seen Associated Press articles that say that Texas adopted 75 mph speed limits in 1999 (example article). This is incorrect. Gallego introduced a bill in 1999, HB 3328, that would have allowed 75 mph limits on all roads numbered by the state or federal government and 80 mph on I-10 and I-20 in any county with fewer than 25,000 residents. (Interesting point: the wording of the bill may have forced the 80 mph limits instead of just allowing the Texas Transportation Commission to set them.) However, this bill died in conference committee immediately before the end of that year’s legislative session. (I.e., it never went into effect.)

Gallgeo introduced a modified bill only allowing 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 10 people per square mile in 2001. This was HB 299. That one passed and was signed by the governor.

Then in 2005, Gallego’s introduced a third bill, HB 2257, that allowed 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 15 people per square mile and allowed 80 mph limits on I-10 and I-20 in certain named counties. This bill went into effect on Sept. 1, 2005. It took the TxDOT several months to amend its Procedures for Establishing Speed Zones to allow it to recommend these limits, then another month or so to get the recommendation up to the Texas Transportation Commission for approval.

Anyway, enough talk. The 80 mph limit signs are up, and here are the pictures, courtesy of Pete Gallego’s office.

What you are seeing below the sign is a NIGHT 65 speed limit sign. Texas is the only state with a blanket night speed limit.

As of 4:11 PM today, the Texas Transportation Commission has approved 80 mph speed limits on certain portions of I-10 and I-20 in far west Texas. Now all we are waiting on is for the Texas Department of Transportation to post speed limit signs.