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Read the latest news and announcements from traffic safety interest groups and about traffic safety topics here.
This week, and every week, parents should have conversations with their teens about the important rules they need to follow to stay safe behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. These rules address the greatest dangers for teen drivers: distracted driving (texting while driving) impaired driving (alcohol and drugs) inconsistent or no seat belt use […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Barbara Rooney, Governor’s Representative (GR) and Director of the California Office of Traffic Safety (CA OTS), was elected to serve as Chair of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) Executive Board at the organization’s 2022 Annual Meeting last week in Louisville, Ky. Rooney will serve a one-year term for GHSA, the national nonprofit […]
Drowsy driving is a significant threat to traffic safety and public health. Although underreported in government statistics, previous research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has estimated that 6% to 11% of all police-reported motor-vehicle crashes and 16% to 21% of fatal crashes likely involve drowsy driving. Thus, there is a need to identify […]
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today released its early estimates of traffic fatalities for the first half of 2022. An estimated 20,175 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, an increase of about 0.5% as compared to 20,070 fatalities NHTSA projected for the first half of 2021. However, NHTSA projects that the second quarter of […]
Distracted driving is a major contributor to crashes. In 2020, there were 3,142 lives lost to crashes involving distracted driving (Stewart, 2022). Countermeasures that aim to reduce distracted driving exist, such as laws, enforcement campaigns, outreach, and programs for adult and teen drivers (Venkatraman et al., 2021). However, these typically target the drivers themselves; few […]
The COVID-19 pandemic, mitigation efforts such as stay-at-home orders, and ensuing trends such as the rise in working from home, have had substantial impacts on traffic. In March, NHTSA reported that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) decreased 11% from 2019 to 2020, while police-reported crashes decreased 22%. However, fatalities per 100 million VMT increased 21% from […]
Nearly every day, millions of children across the United States line up to ride the bus to school. The school bus is one of the safest modes of transportation, but illegal school bus passing poses a significant threat to children and their caretakers. During National School Bus Safety Week [which is October 17-21, 2022] help […]
School buses are the safest way for children to get to school. Their design was meant to be safer than any passenger vehicle in avoiding crashes and preventing injuries. Teaching children to follow safety rules on the bus is just as important as informing drivers about the laws regarding school buses. Read more here.
The deployment of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies may hold health and safety benefits for drivers across the driving lifespan (>18 years of age). However, up until now, the perceptions of such drivers about AVs have not been examined with a combined approach of using surveys and pre- and post-exposure to the actual technology. Lived experiences […]
For this fact sheet, urban boundaries are determined by the State highway departments and approved by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and the areas outside of those boundaries are described as rural. The State highway departments use the boundaries decided by the Census Bureau. Read the full study here.
