With the nation suffering under $4 per gallon gasoline, there’s at least one good piece of news: traffic fatalities may be cut by up to almost one-third. About 1,000 each month, 12,000 per year, with teen drivers enjoying the biggest reduction.
Researchers Michael Morrisey, Ph.D., director of University of Alabama, Birmingham’s Lister Hill Center for Health Policy, and David Grabowski, Ph.D. of Harvard Medical School studied the fatality rate per capita from driving crashes, then compared those rates to the quarterly cost of gasoline between 1983 and 2000. They found that each 10 percent increase in the cost of gasoline was accompanied by a 2.3 percent reduction in driving fatalities.
Re-visiting the research using price data through 2006 showed consistent results, and suggests that fatalities could be reduced by as much as 1,000 people per month with our current $4 per gallon fuel cost. Annualized, 12,000 fatalities avoided is almost one-third of the roughly 40,000 annual death toll on America’s highways.
Teens are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of this phenomenon. While the entire driving population shows a 2.3 percent reduction, 15 to 17 year old drivers saw a decline of six percent, while for 18 to 21 year old drivers it was 3.2 percent.
What’s happening in your family? Are you limiting your teen’s driving? Does your teen have enough of his or her own money to afford $4 gas? Are your teens driving slower to save gas? Driving less? Waiting until a later age to begin driving? No matter what the reason, when teens — the most crash-prone, risky drivers — drive fewer miles, it’s bound to have an effect on the overall statistics.
There aren’t many silver linings to the dark and persistent $4 per gallon gas situation, but we can be glad it’s saving lives.
