
Most people know that traffic injuries and deaths continued at a high rate even though there were fewer drivers on the road during the pandemic. Many reports attributed this anomaly to higher speeds while roads weren’t clogged. But now the Washington Post is reporting on a different theory. Their article claims that a higher percentage of young, risk-taking drivers were on the road during the height of Covid. Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:
“We saw this small group of people who were driving more than they did before the pandemic were the same people who were the highest-risk drivers on the road,” said AAA senior researcher Brian Tefft.
Traffic fatalities jumped 12 percent to 31,700 deaths in the first nine months of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020 — the largest year-over-year rise since at least 1975, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2020, about 38,680 people died in vehicle crashes, the highest since 2007.