Are ‘good roads’ leading to more speeding deaths in NC?
By Jaymie Baxley
Despite being nicknamed the “Good Roads State,” North Carolina holds the grim distinction of having one of the nation’s highest rates of deadly crashes involving speeding motorists.
A new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 660 speeding-related fatalities happened on North Carolina roads in 2022. Texas and California were the only states with more speeding deaths than North Carolina, which has a much smaller population than either of those states.
Speeding was linked to 40 percent of all traffic deaths recorded in the state in 2022, tying North Carolina with New Mexico for the fourth-highest rate of fatalities related primarily to speed in the U.S. The state with the highest rate was tiny Rhode Island, where 48 percent of fatal crashes were due to speed.
The study, however, offers little explanation for why North Carolina has more speeding-related deaths than nearly every other state. Notably, NHTSA found that drivers involved in fatal speeding crashes in North Carolina were less likely to be engaged in other dangerous activities, such as drunken driving or driving without a seat belt, than motorists in states with fewer fatalities.
Thirty-six percent of North Carolina’s speeding-related deaths involved alcohol, slightly below the national average of 38 percent. Cases involving people who were not wearing a seat belt accounted for 45 percent of the state’s speeding fatalities, less than the national rate of 48 percent.
Route causes
First Sgt. Christopher Knox, a spokesperson for North Carolina Highway Patrol, said several factors could be contributing to the state’s relatively high share of speeding fatalities.
One issue, he noted, is a shortage of Highway Patrol members. The agency currently has more than 270 vacancies for sworn positions.
“Enforcement is a big part of curbing speed-related fatalities,” Knox said in a phone interview, adding that fines and the threat of time behind bars can be effective deterrents against speeding. “It’s not just about stopping that one person who is speeding before something happens. Hopefully, the punishment they receive for a speeding citation changes their thought process and their driving behavior.”
Violators aren’t going unpunished, according to Knox. He said state troopers write about 300,000 tickets a year for speeding.
“Our members are accountable for their daily efforts to curb traffic fatalities, and so we feel the people we have in place are doing the job they’re supposed to do,” Knox said. “We just know that we could do even more with more people.”
Another potential factor, ironically, is the state’s extensive and well-maintained road network, which has earned North Carolina its “Good Roads” reputation.
“Having really good infrastructure in place, having good roads, having large roads, having roads with lots and lots of lanes that allow traffic to operate at the posted speed, is great,” Knox said. “But we need to convince drivers to operate at the posted speed.”
North Carolina ranks second to Texas in the number of miles of roads maintained by a state government, even as Texas boasts more than five times the number of square miles of land. The NHTSA study found that Texas also led the nation in speeding-related fatalities in 2022, with more than 1,500 deaths.
“Larger states with more roads, your Texases and your North Carolinas, are kind of at the top of that list,” Knox said. “When you’re not going five miles per hour down the road because of congestion and you have the freedom to go at the speed limit — that very well could play into why speed shows in some states versus other states.”
‘Vision zero’
Statistics on speeding deaths are released annually by NHTSA, which bases its findings on data from the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
To be included in the system, a death must occur within 30 days of a vehicle crash. NHTSA says it waits for death reports to be finalized to give “outside sources” enough time to submit “important variable data” that may lead to changes in the annual tally.
2022 is the most recent year for which finalized data on speeding-related fatalities is available. It is also the deadliest year on record for the state, according to an NC Health News analysis of NHTSA publications dating back to 1994.
The analysis found that North Carolina last logged more than 600 speeding deaths in 2007, when 620 fatalities were counted. The uptick from 2021, when there were 478 such deaths, marked a 38-percent increase — the second-ever largest spike recorded for the state.
The biggest known increase happened from 2019 to 2020, when North Carolina went from 307 speeding-related fatalities to 489. Knox said that jump was a “huge anomaly,” spurred in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we saw during COVID was that we had great roads, great infrastructure — and people driving looked at that and said, ‘Well, there’s not many cars out here so I can drive however I want,’” he said. “That works as long as you’re not worried about your safety and the safety of others you’re sharing the road with.”
Mark Ezzell, director of the North Carolina Governor’s Highway Safety Program, believes many motorists were unable to “take out their frustrations in conventional ways” during the early months of the pandemic, leading them to blow off steam by driving at unsafe speeds.
“People were anxious and they sort of showed that anxiety through their driving behavior,” he said. “I think that’s become a little incorporated into our driving behavior post-COVID.”
The normalization of speeding has been compounded by the automotive industry’s tendency to use fastness as a selling point for vehicles, according to Ezzell.
“We have cars that sometimes are deliberately designed to be unsafe. We have roads that are built sometimes with convenience as a primary concern, and that at times can be unsafe. We’ve got drivers that are dealing with levels of anxiety that I think have gotten worse, post-COVID,” he said. “All those things have come together to make this an issue, and not all of those are things that can be addressed at the state level.”
The good news, Knox said, is that speeding-related fatalities appear to be on the decline.
“We’re trending back towards more of a five-year average, but know that the five-year average is not the goal,” he said. “The goal is to trend towards the ‘Vision Zero’ philosophy that law enforcement, first responders and transportation communities are buying into — to get it down to zero.”
The post Are ‘good roads’ leading to more speeding deaths in NC? appeared first on North Carolina Health News.
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