Statistics can be used to tell stories, and it's often used by technologists and engineers as well as police officers. 94 percent of US traffic crashes are the result of human error. The number felt right to me. It appealed to an American idea that people are in charge of their own futures. The way roads are built, the way cars are designed, the way streets are governed, it placed the burden of road safety on the driver.
The misunderstanding of a 2015 report from the US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration led to the statistic. The driver was the critical reason behind most crashes studied by the report. The driver's actions were usually the last in a long chain of events. The driver's movement of the wheel was the final thing to go wrong, a process that started with the surveying of the highway, or the road design laid out on the desk of an engineer.
The US DOT nixed the 94 percent figure from its website after pleas from researchers, advocates and another Biden administration official. Pete Buttigieg told a different story about US road deaths during a press conference in Washington, DC. He said that his goal was zero road deaths.
The National Roadway Safety Strategy is a set of actions and recommendations that could affect everything from speed limits to street design to the technology required in cars. If all goes to plan, the strategy could lead to fewer deaths on US roads.
Ken McLeod, policy director for the League, says that the paradigm shift is to recognize that people are going to make mistakes and that we aren't going to berate and enforce our way to perfect behavior.
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