Strict Safety Standards Primary Lifesavers

"This suggests that an increasingly dangerous traffic environment has been offset since 1994 only because people are driving vehicles that are more protective," Lund points out. "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 increased. An estimated 5,200 additional lives would have been lost in 2004 without the vehicle design changes."


By only looking at the continuing decrease in auto fatalities, some advocates of higher speed limits, chaffing under the 55 mph national speed limit were able to lift that limit to 65 mph. In some states, like Texas, the speed limit was recently raised to 80 mph, and in other states to 75 mph on interstate highways.


"But our research shows that speed limits do matter," Lund says, "because, once we adjusted for vehicle age and design, what became clear are the escalating dangers of everyday traffic. We have serious problems out there with faster travel speeds, and we need to address these problems with effective policies. Of course, we also need to continue to improve vehicles, because right now this is the main protection in crashes associated with unchecked driving behavior like speeding." Of course, traffic conditions, road quality, and automotive performance capabilities all influence the effects of fast driving as well as the effects of speeding.


The research report, "Trends over time in the risk of driver death: what if vehicle designs had not improved—" by C.M. Farmer and A.K. Lund will be published in the journal, "Traffic Injury Prevention," later this year.