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American Road Deaths Spiked In 2015, And No One Knows Why

In the past decade, American roads have grown marginally safer to motorists and pedestrians, with the lowest annual death toll ever in 2014—a still gruesome 32,675. Today, traffic safety officials warned that those trends reversed in 2015 with a vengeance, and no one yet knows why.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says its estimates of all traffic deaths in the first nine months of 2015, including crashes, motorcyclists and pedestrians, shows a 9.7 percent increase over the same period a year earlier, for a total of roughly 26,000 lives lost. If the trend holds for the entire year, 2015 would have been the most deadly time on American roads since 2008, when 37,423 lives were lost.

The first thing experts ask in response to statistics like these is whether simply driving more miles triggered more crashes; vehicle miles traveled hit an all-time high last year of 3.1 trillion miles. But even adjusting for more driving, the rate of fatalities per miles driven also spiked, to 1.1 deaths per 100 million miles driven, up from 1.05 a year earlier.

As the map shows, the increases were not spread evenly across the country; the northwest mountain states and the southeast Gulf states saw the highest increases, although fatalities climbed in every region. In response to the numbers, NHTSA officials vowed to intensify efforts against drunk driving, not wearing seat belts and “behavioral issues” (i.e., distraction) while looking for new solutions.

But the data isn’t clear enough yet to pinpoint exactly why more Americans are dying on the roads. NHTSA plans to have a fuller analysis with totals for 2015 in a few months—and even if it solves the mystery of why people are dying, the more complex question of what can be done about it will remain.