Discussing safety on Atlanta’s roads gets repetitive. What more can be said than, “We collectively just need to do better?” Yet, despite safety features in vehicles only getting more advanced, traffic fatality rates in Georgia are higher than they were 10 years ago. AJC reporters Helena Oliviero and Justin Price did a deep dive on Georgia’s 2022 traffic numbers, and the trends are eye popping.
Traffic deaths would trend downward if Georgians would go back to the basics they learned in driver’s ed: Look up, strap up, and sober up.
The one piece of good news that Oliviero and Price found in GDOT’s crash stats is that the overall number of road deaths decreased in 2022 (1,982) from 2021 (2,020).
Crash rates had been on the increase in the last couple of years since the COVID-19 shutdown, as speeding, recklessness, distractions, and impairment have all spiked since 2020. Traffic deaths had begun trending down in Georgia after the Hands-Free Georgia Act took effect in 2018. But that improvement was short lived.
GDOT numbers indicate that speeding played a role in 16% of 2022′s traffic deaths, and aggressive driving factored in approximately 20%. Impaired driving was suspected or found in 18% of those wrecks.
Then jaws should drop. Distracted drivers were a part of a staggering 45% of fatal wrecks, per the same GDOT data set. And only 38% of those killed in 2022 wrecks were confirmed to be wearing a seatbelt; the rest either did not wear belts or police could not confirm that they were.
What more can be said about alert driving? We have more distractions at our fingertips than ever before and more driving aids than ever. Just a short look away from the road can cause long consequences. Drivers simply need to treat their time behind the wheel as a life-or-death event and need to allot their attention as such.
Finding another angle on sober driving is also hard. But driving impairment still seems to make an outsized appearance in driving stats, despite the generations of literature and education against it. Stats show that beer consumption is down, but people are still drinking plenty of alcohol. There is wider illegal use of marijuana and all sorts of micro-dosing with various substances. Some of these may not even show up in post-crash tox screens. But none of them make drivers’ senses more crisp and road ready.
The most befuddling and frustrating finding in the crash data is the lack of seatbelt use. When the WSB Traffic Team spoke to GDOT to recap Georgia’s roads in 2021, we were stunned to learn that seatbelt use was such a factor in road deaths. Frankly, so was GDOT.
Wearing a seatbelt is arguably the least freedom-limiting thing drivers and passengers should do regarding auto safety. The fact that wearing seatbelts used to be optional and their being made into law was controversial ranks right up there with smoking on airplanes as ridiculous. How are so many drivers just ignoring such an easy safeguard?
Seatbelts do not protect pedestrians — 17% of the state’s 2022 road fatalities involved people outside of vehicles. Sadly, all of the above factors have made for some of the highest pedestrian fatality numbers in 40 years. Another exacerbating factor is the size of vehicles people drive, which has increased dramatically in the 21st century. SUVs and trucks have more blind spots, higher bumpers, and are heavier, all of which factor into making the environment outside of them less safe.
Drivers should feel safer in bigger automobiles, but they also should drive with even more caution, because they can cause more damage.
The grim numbers are enough to get the Department of Health a $2.5 million grant from the National Highway Safety Administration to, among other things, analyze crash data, fund more education efforts, and distribute car seats. A couple of million bucks is but a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the problem.
Education and analysis may help, but the solution starts at home. Drivers have been educated for generations now about the dangers of not wearing seatbelts and driving drunk. Most millennials and every Gen-Z motorist have been warned about texting and driving. All three toxic behaviors are prevalent in safe driving PSAs that are exposed to all ages.
If our society wants safer roads, we have to start with the basics: Buckle up, sober up, and look up.
Doug Turnbull, the PM drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. Download the Triple Team Traffic Alerts App to hear reports from the WSB Traffic Team automatically when you drive near trouble spots. Contact him at Doug.Turnbull@cmg.com.
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