AAA says that even though drivers tend to focus more on how traffic congestion hurts productivity and makes travelers miserable, the actual cost of crashes totals more than twice the cost of congestion. The human toll is also more daunting: 42,642 people died in automobile crashes in 2006, which equates to about 117 deaths per day and almost five per hour.
However traffic safety hasn't received adequate attention from government officials, the study reveals. The study is part of a program meant to compel safety, health and other officials to pursue traffic safety more aggressively. One of the report's recommendations is the establishment of a national safety goal "to cut surface transportation fatalities in half by 2025."
"It's the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing every week," says Robert L. Darbelnet, AAA's president and chief executive. "If that happened, you know the jets would be grounded until we figured out what was wrong." However, people find it easier to ignore traffic fatalities in part because they don't get as much attention, he says.
The AAA and other groups promoting highway safety, from insurance-industry organizations to the federal Department of Transportation, say the main problems include excessive speed, impaired driving and occupant protection such as enforcing mandatory seatbelt use. But changing people's attitudes about accident avoidance and other safety issues is difficult in part because of denial.
"Traffic accidents happen in ones and twos, and people see them as random events that don't affect them," says Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. "They certainly don't think it will happen to them."
In its study, the AAA determines the cost of crashes based on 11 "cost components," including lost income, property damage, medical expense, emergency services, travel delay, rehabilitation and administrative and legal costs. The group calculated the cost of crashes for the same metropolitan areas examined in the Texas Transportation Institute's annual Urban Mobility Report that estimates the cost of traffic congestion.