The Feds Think They Can Save 67 Lives for the Low, Low Price of $48 Million
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) wants to regulate a crisis that doesn’t exist—and it’s going to cost tens of millions of dollars.
On Monday, the NHTSA proposed a new vehicle safety standard “to reduce fatalities and serious injuries among pedestrians struck by vehicles.” If approved, the proposal will establish “new test procedures to stimulate a head-to-hood impact, along with performance requirements to minimize risk of head injury.”
The proposal follows news that yearly pedestrian fatalities increased by 75 percent since a 2009 nadir, as reported by NPR. While the near-doubling of pedestrian deaths over 15 years certainly sounds alarming, do we really have a “crisis of roadway deaths” that’s “even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” as NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman claims? A cursory examination of the statistics suggests not.
In absolute terms, pedestrian traffic fatalities have increased 83 percent, from 4,109 in 2009 to 7,522 in 2022, the last year for which we have data. Per capita terms are more informative. With a population of 306.8 million in 2009 and 333.3 million in 2022, per capita pedestrian deaths increased by 77 percent, from approximately 13 to 23 per million. To put this into perspective, 46,653 Americans died from falls in 2022—nearly an order of magnitude greater than pedestrian fatalities.
Since the establishment of the NHTSA by the Highway Safety Act of 1970, pedestrian deaths have been virtually stagnant in absolute terms: 7,516 and 7,522 pedestrians died in 1975 and 2022, respectively. This translates to a steady per capita decre
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