NCDOT: More people died on NC roads in 2021 than in any year since the early 1970s
The number of people killed in traffic crashes in North Carolina rose again last year, reaching the highest level since the early 1970s, according to the N.C. Governor’s Highway Safety Program.
Highway deaths have risen 45% since 2011, to 1,755 last year. That’s the most in a single year since 1973, when the death toll reached 1,892, according to data compiled by the N.C. Department of Transportation.
The preliminary numbers for 2021 are further evidence that decades of gains in highway safety are being eroded. Several factors have helped make driving safer over the years, including increased use of seat belts and improvements to cars and trucks, such as airbags, anti-lock brakes and better protection of occupants in a crash.
The number of highway traffic deaths per capita in North Carolina declined 70% between 1968 and 2011, according to NCDOT.
Since then, deaths per capita have risen by 33%, with the largest jumps coming since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020.
“We have seen traffic fatalities moving in the wrong direction for a couple years in North Carolina and across the country,” Mark Ezzell, director of the Highway Safety Program, said in a statement. “It’s going to take an all-hands-on-deck approach from communities, organizations and individual drivers to reverse this trend.”
Ezzell said the 2021 data is based on law enforcement crash reports submitted to NCDOT by the end of the year. He said the numbers are likely to rise as more reports are received and processed.
The rise in traffic fatalities during the COVID-19 pandemic was striking because overall collisions declined as people drove less when businesses and schools closed.
Traffic safety experts have struggled to explain the conflicting trends but theorize that fewer cars on the road made it easier to speed, increasing the chances that crashes will become fatal. Speeding was a factor in about a quarter of all highway deaths last year, according to the Governor’s Highway Safety Program.
Another big factor was lack of seat belt use. The number of unbelted people who died in crashes last year rose slightly, to 546. Subtracting pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, that means about 43% of people killed in crashes who had access to a seat belt weren’t wearing one.
Deaths among motorcyclists last year rose about 15% to 205, according to the Highway Safety Program, while deaths among bicyclists declined about 20% to 23.
Pedestrians accounted for 256 of the people killed in vehicle crashes last year, or about 15% of the total.
The rise in fatalities in North Carolina reflects a nationwide trend. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration this month estimated that 31,720 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the first nine months of last year, up 12% from the same period a year earlier and the most since 2006.
The estimate came days after the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a national roadway safety strategy that includes assistance in designing safer roads and requiring new safety technology on cars and trucks.
“This is a national crisis,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “We cannot and must not accept these deaths as an inevitable part of everyday life.”
This story was originally published February 15, 2022 at 10:13 AM with the headline "NCDOT: More people died on NC roads in 2021 than in any year since the early 1970s."
