In The News

Rough roads major factor in deaths

Road conditions play a pivotal role in highway deaths and accidents, according to a study conducted by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation on behalf of the Transportation Construction Coalition.

Roadway condition is a contributing factor in more than half of the 42,000 deaths that occur yearly on U.S. roadways, the study concludes, and the costs associated with roadway-condition-enabled crashes exceed $217 billion yearly.

“On a Crash Course: The Dangers and Health Costs of Deficient Roadways” – full report available here – analyzes data from, among other sources, the Large Truck Crash Causation Study conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration earlier this decade. (A different study concluded that, among crashes reported in those data, 20 percent of large truck accidents were caused by road conditions.)

The PIRE study was focused more broadly on the entire U.S. driving population. “Drivers often make minor errors,” said PIRE’s Ted Miller, the study’s author, noting among principle findings that “when the roadway is deficient, those errors are more likely to cause a crash.”

While state and federal efforts to improve highway safety have not ignored roadway conditions, the heavy focus on driver behavior in recent years has come at the expense of capital investment in roadway conditions for their safety benefits, according to Miller. “It’s far more practical to make the roadway environment more forgiving and protective,” he says.

The study includes a ranking of states by road-related crash costs per million vehicle miles traveled. The top 10 most costly are Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. Of those states, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma also placed in Overdrive’s top 10 for Worst Roads in 2008. For that full report click here .

www.eTrucker.com