Traffic fatalities surpass pre-pandemic levels in continued ‘public health crisis’

The number of people seriously injured or killed on Austin roadways over the past two years is higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to an update released late last month by the city’s Vision Zero program.

The report says that 1,287 people were seriously injured or killed on Austin roadways during 2021 and 2022, compared to 1,248 people in 2018 and 2019.

“Consistent with national trends, injuries and fatalities sustained in crashes on Austin’s roadways in the past two years remain higher than pre-pandemic levels and continue to be a public health crisis in our community,” the report reads.

The report is a two-year update covering program activities for Vision Zero, a city initiative tasked with eliminating traffic-related serious injuries and fatalities. According to the report, fatal crashes occurring on state-owned roadways increased substantially, while those occurring on city-owned streets remained relatively flat.

These traffic fatalities resulted in more than 8,000 years of human life lost. That number is calculated using a public health metric that quantifies the additional years a person would have lived had they not died prematurely, according to the report.

Pedestrian fatalities in particular continued to rise at “an alarming rate,” according to the report, with 42 and 48 pedestrians killed in 2021 and 2022, respectively. The city’s previous five-year average was 30 pedestrian fatalities per year.

The report found that Austin’s Black population continues to be “significantly overrepresented among severe crash victims. While Black people make up less than 7 percent of the Austin population, they accounted for 15 percent of people seriously injured or killed in crashes over the past two years.”

Crashes cost the local economy more than $6.8 billion in losses related to medical and administrative costs, motor vehicle damage, employers’ uninsured costs, wage/productivity losses and lost quality of life, according to the report.

Several factors are contributing to these trends, the report suggests, including the increasingly large size of motor vehicles, an uptick in high-risk behaviors (such as speeding and impaired driving) and reduced traffic enforcement.

“The core of the problem, however, remains that we have a transportation system that was not designed to account for human mistakes and does not adequately mitigate the potential severity of crashes,” the report reads. “Vision Zero’s work continues to focus on redesigning streets to lower safety risks on all our roadways.”

Key highlights from Vision Zero work in 2021 and 2022 include seven completed intersection safety projects; design, initial construction or scoping on another 25 intersections; 34 rapid response safety interventions; and lowering speed limits on nearly 50 arterial streets and hundreds of residential streets.

The program also leveraged local community bond dollars to secure more than $27 million in federal funds to increase the scope of work.

“These investments have already started to show positive signs in improving safety, including a 31 percent reduction in serious injury and fatal crashes at major intersection safety project locations,” the report reads. “However, with more than 280 square miles within the city limits and a rapidly growing population, systematically redesigning Austin’s entire transportation system will take time. We must double down on our commitment to implement bold safety strategies in partnership with our community.”

Photo by Eliseo Velázquez Rivero, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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