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Factors Which Contribute to Road Crashes — a list of 78

It is a well-known fact that a mere handful of crash-types are the major killers on roads.  These include impaired driving, distracted driving, drowsy driving, speed, vulnerable road users, and so on.  However, although these are indeed the biggest issues, this is not the full story and it is regrettable that people aren’t made more aware of the many other factors and causes.

Only the causes of the crash are listed in the factors shown below. The types of vehicle, direction of travel, resultant damage, etc., are entered in a different part of the overall document.  Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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Road Safety Annual Report 2019 — see how the USA performed

It is a sad and frankly reprehensible fact that American people are led to believe that the USA performs to a high standard in road safety when the opposite is actually the truth.

This is not just some faceless crash-scene photo, this was the crash that killed a 21 year-old man in Pennsylvania when his car was hit head-on by the truck, in which the driver was using a cellphone.  Go to www.roadsafetyusa.org and type Paul Miller into the search box to see the full story.

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A Pilot’s Comparison of Safety in Planes Versus Cars

I’ve just had a great conversation, this evening, with a pilot who was at the next table to mine at dinner.

Our initial topic came from him and was about the safety comparison between air travel and driving, so I asked whether he was aware that for every person killed in commercial flights worldwide, each year, over 2,160 people are killed in road crashes.  Yes, a ratio of more than 2,000-to-1,  and even the number of people killed annually just on America’s roads is over 60-times greater than the total number of plane-crash fatalities worldwide.

Various Boeing jets in BBJ livery. (Wikimedia Commons.)

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The Latest Crash and Casualty Figures for the USA

Because of the complexity of the subject, the finalized crash and casualty statistics for 2017 have just been released by NHTSA.

An overhead sign on the approach to a crash scene.  (Copyright image, 2019.)

In that year, in the USA, there were an estimated 6,452,000 police-reported traffic crashes, in which 37,133 people were killed and approximately 2,746,000 people were injured.

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The Big List — U.S. Road Crash Fatality Comparisons that will Stun You!

For many years, there has been a tendency to state that ‘x’ days of road fatalities are the same as a full Jumbo Jet airliner crashing, but no matter how effective the comparison is intended to be, this relies on both the teller and the listener knowing – for example – which size of Jumbo jet one is talking about; there are several different passenger-carrying capacities so even though it is a big plane the concept is a bit vague.

Memorial garden at the crash site of Colgan Air (Continental Connection) Flight 3407, which occured on February 12, 2009, with the loss of fifty lives.
The memorial garden in Clarence Center, NY, a location which — at the time of writing — is the site of the most recent passenger plane crash in the USA, which occurred more than ten years ago.  As a matter of perspective, however, the fifty people lost in that tragic, headline-news incident represent less than half of the people who are killed, on average, every single day of every year on America’s roads. (Copyright image, 2019.)

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