CRASH COURSE

More Americans have died on US roads since 2006 than in World Wars I & II combined

In the time it takes the average person to read this article, about a dozen people will die in traffic accidents around the world. It would be nice if the deaths stopped as soon as you were done reading, but the accidents and the deaths go on all day and all night, around the clock every day of the year.

Believe it or not, the estimated global highway death toll for 2023 is already well beyond 160,000 (per www.worldometers.info). And it’s only the middle of February. The CDC gives a worldwide highway death toll of nearly 3,700 people every single day.

No community is immune. In the past few days several people have died in traffic mishaps in and around Aiken and Augusta, and the same is true more or less everywhere around the world.

This is probably not the best time to mention that more than two years ago, during 2020, the target completion year for an ambitious worldwide program called Decade of Action for Road Safety came and went. Officially created by the United Nations General Assembly in March 2010 and launched in May of 2011, the Decade was viewed as a historic opportunity to increase action to save millions of lives on roadways over the decade ending in 2020.

“The goal of the Decade is to stabilize and then reduce the number of lives lost. A Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety outlines a course of action for ensuring that this vision becomes a reality.

“The vision is a world in which mobility is safe for all those who use the world’s roads. The alternative is grim: if no action is taken to address the current crisis, road traffic fatalities are forecast to rise from the current level of nearly 1.3 million deaths annually to more than 1.9 million deaths per year by 2020.”

Maybe the program is working: referencing “nearly 1.3 million deaths annually” at the start of the program along with the stated goal to first stablize and then reduce the death rate,