Last Friday, a courier service delivery van crashed into The Cross in Oswestry. People sit on the benches around it all the time, especially on pretty days such as Friday. One of our friends happened along about five minutes after the accident when people were still trapped under fallen masonry. My wife happened along later in the afternoon when the injured had been taken to hospital but everything was still cordoned off. Stiff drinks were needed that evening.
Nobody drives fast at The Cross. The main road through there makes a 90 degree curve that has to be taken slowly. But the van hit The Cross hard, as though perhaps the driver accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake.
Much closer to home, over the weekend there was a three-vehicle accident at a roundabout in our village. No one seemed to be badly hurt. The same couldn’t be said for all the vehicles. It’s an odd, tricky little junction that people don’t go through fast, yet the front end of one of the cars was thoroughly smashed in.
Perception and Nagging Doubt
V and I believe we have been seeing an increase in what might be called aberrant driving behavior. It seems our defensive driving has to be better than what used to be routinely necessary.
I’m trying to politely say we feel like driving is getting crazier.
From the UK biobank brain scan study that I’ve discussed here before, we expected drivers to start having more difficulty making good decisions. Driving is complex. Your brain has to process large amounts of information quickly, make decisions and carry them out at the right instant. Any illness that hits executive function makes driving more of a challenge, maybe too much to handle any more. We know the types of brain injury COVID can inflict impair executive function.
Is there really more bad driving around us, or are we simply convincing ourselves of it because it’s what we expect to see? Who would have some data? This isn’t what medical researchers would study…
It’s what insurers would see in their claims data. What do they say?
USA Crash Claims are More Severe
According to a May 2023 article in the Insurance Journal, a USA publication, LexisNexis Risk Solutions found that since 2019:
The severity of collision claims is up 40%
Bodily injury and property damage claims for automotive accidents is up 35%
Major speeding is up 20%
The article says this is due to people driving as though the roads are still as empty as they were early in the pandemic. I don’t see any justification for that conclusion but I can’t refute it either.
UK Mixed Story
What about the UK? We had more distinct national lockdowns and a more distinct lifting of restrictions. We also have government data about road usage.
I’ve shown an especially interesting graph from the government’s page about relevant statistics up to June 2022. The all-casualties rate has stayed below 2019 levels. Killed or severely injured rates only exceeded 2019 levels briefly a couple of times. But fatalities by themselves, considered separately from non-fatal injury, are another story. That rate goes far above 2019 levels, specially with a lag after the July 2021 lifting of most pandemic measures. It was shooting up again at the end of the reporting period.
That meshes well with LexisNexis saying when car crashes happen in the USA, on average they have become more severe.
British miles driven went through the floor in 2020 and the first half of 2021 due to lockdowns, people working from home and kids doing school online at least some of the time. I would like to know whether Brits drove as much in 2022 as in 2019, but that data doesn’t seem to be available yet. The Department for Transport is slower than the Office for National Statistics to release validated data, so its figures about how many miles were driven in the UK only go through 2021. If we aren’t yet driving more than in 2019 but more people are dying in traffic accidents, that would be alarming, but we simply don’t know.
Factoring in what has happened to the NHS during the past four years is also hard to do, but it seems the USA’s health care system is heavily strained too. I’ll leave that for another day.
Suppositions for the Time Being
The data isn’t clear enough to say driving really has gotten crazier. Maybe we’re just seeing what we expect to see.
But the data does say that when mistakes happen on the road these days, the outcome is measurably worse than it used to be. More people die. More vehicles are totaled, which the insurance industry article specifically discussed as taking more effort for insurers to process than when vehicles can be repaired.
Whether or not it’s any more crazy out there than it used to be, it’s somewhat more dangerous. I’m glad V and I are not driving as much as we did before. (Not to mention it’s better for the environment too.)
I think a lot has to do with people being distracted by text messages, phone calls, and notifications. If I'm using GPS to navigate, a notification from an unrelated source appears on my screen. It's natural to want to read it. Sometimes it needs to be swiped away so I can see the directions. Annoying. Here in Lawton, Oklahoma, it seems to be acceptable to run red lights. People know the opposing light turns green a second or so after their light turns red, so they feel "safe" in running through it even though they have plenty of time to stop at yellow. We also have almost no "smart" signals that are responsive to actual traffic. They are timed, whether there is traffic at the intersection or not. Very frustrating. I think many people run lights so they don't get stuck in long waits. Your post reminded me to write to the city managers about this problem. Also, marijuana use is up due to legalizing it, and from interactions I've had with some stoned folks, I don't see how they can possibly drive safely since they can't even keep focused on a task. Defensive driving is more important than ever.