Posted on: 11/30/2015

Gas prices are falling to a low this holiday season and as a result there will be more miles traveled from Thanksgiving to New Year than last year. Last year highway fatalities totaled 32,675. Sadly, January through June this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports the number of deaths is up 8.1 percent.

Crash data from 2014:

• Drunk driving crashes continue to represent roughly one-third of fatalities, resulting in 9,967 deaths in 2014.
• Nearly half (49%) of passenger vehicle occupants killed were not wearing seat belts.
• The number of motorcyclists killed was far higher in states without strong helmet laws, resulting in 1,565 lives lost in 2014.
• Cyclist deaths declined by 2.3 percent, but pedestrian deaths rose by 3.1 percent from the previous year. In 2014, there were 726 cyclists and 4,884 pedestrians killed in motor vehicle crashes.
• Distracted driving accounted for 10 percent of all crash fatalities, killing 3,179 people in 2014.
• Drowsy driving accounted for 2.6 percent of all crash fatalities; at least 846 people died in these crashes in 2014.

Although some states now have laws that make driving and using a hand-held phone illegal, other states have failed to tackle this problem. Most certainly, this fairly recent distraction is the cause of a huge number of accidents.

Seat belts are another problem even with laws in many states requiring the use of belts by all passengers. We can help by refusing to drive if a passenger isn’t buckled up or ride as a passenger if the driver doesn’t buckle up.

Share the above data with everyone you know and ask them to do their part in protecting lives.