Safe Transportation Research & Education Center

The UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) has released the California Traffic Safety Survey 2024. The study was led by Ewald & Wasserman Research Consultants (E&W) and conducted on behalf of the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) and SafeTREC.

The California Traffic Safety Survey has been conducted annually since 2010 to gain a better understanding of a range of traffic safety behaviors, and to help inform traffic safety programs and public education campaigns. This year’s survey was conducted with an online panel of California drivers in all California counties for a total of 2,507 respondents, with the majority of those surveyed (57.9% weighted) coming from Southern California and falling within the 18-44 age range.

Bicycling is becoming more popular across the country, for commuting, exercise, and leisure. In 2017, there were 783 bicyclists killed in a traffic collision in the US. In citing concern about the level of bicycle fatalities, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) identified key recommendations for improving safety, including collection of better crash data, increased training for law enforcement to understand laws designed to protect bicyclists, partnerships with bicycling and community organizations regarding safety messaging and public education campaigns about infrastructure improvements.

Restraint devices such as seat belts are a key element of motor vehicle occupant protection systems. Each year, NHTSA conducts the National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS) that measures, among many variables, the daytime use of seat belts by occupants age eight and older. The 2020 NOPUS reported that seat belt use was 90.3 percent among front-seat passengers, a slight decrease from the 90.7 percent observed in 2018. This change, along with the changes in subsets such as time of day or day of the week, was not statistically significant. 

The United States Department of Transportation uses the Safe System Approach to work towards zero roadway fatalities and serious injuries. The Safe System Approach recognizes human mistakes and vulnerabilities, and designs a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone. The Federal Highway Administration names safe road users, safe vehicles, safe speeds, safe roads, and post-crash care as key elements of a Safe System. Proper use of seat belts and other occupant safety devices is an important component of the “Safer Vehicles” and “Safer People” layers of protection. 

Analyses presented in the occupant protection program area include fatal and serious injuries where a driver or passenger in a passenger vehicle was unrestrained. Occupant protection crashes in this report are defined as crashes where one or more occupants in a passenger vehicle was unrestrained. Under this program area, there is additional analyses that address aging road users and child passenger safety. 

The older adult population in the United States aged 65 and older is expected to almost double between 2016 and 2060, from 49 million to 95 million. In 2018, there were 6,907 people aged 65 or older killed in a traffic crash in the United States; this accounted for 18.9 percent of all traffic fatalities. To provide context, the overall population aged 65 or older accounted for 14.9 percent of people in the United States and 19.4 percent of all licensed drivers in 2017. California has the largest number of licensed drivers aged 65 or older in the nation with 4,251,349, or 15.9 percent of all licensed drivers in the state. However, as drivers age, physical and mental changes including reduced visual acuity, increased fragility, restricted movement, and cognitive impairment can directly and indirectly result in age-related driving impairments.

Analyses presented in this section include fatal and serious injuries to drivers, passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and other non-motor vehicle occupants aged 65 or older.

Everyone is a pedestrian, whether or not walking is one’s primary mode of travel. As a commute mode, walking is gaining in numbers. In 2020, pedestrian deaths accounted for 16.8 percent of all crash fatalities and nearly one-quarter (24.3 percent) of pedestrian fatalities involved a hit-and-run crash. From 2011 to 2020, pedestrian fatalities increased 46.2 percent while other traffic deaths only increased by 14.4 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian fatalities increased 3.9 percent, despite a 13.2 percent reduction in driving. Compared with all other racial categories, American Indian/Alaska Native persons had a substantially higher per-capita rate of fatalities among pedestrians. Black persons had the second highest rate of pedestrian traffic deaths. Preliminary 2021 data suggest that this trend will continue in the near future, reporting that 8,730 people died in roadway fatalities in the first quarter, a 10.5 percent increase from the same period in 2020. 

The use of cannabis, prescription drugs, and other drugs are increasingly prominent on roadways in the United States,where 25.3 percent of the nation’s 38,824 fatalities in 2020 were related to drug-involved driving. Driving can beimpaired by a variety of legal and illegal drugs, substances, and medications. The effect of specific drugs on behaviorand driving skills vary considerably depending on how they act in the brain and are metabolized. They can slow reactiontime, decrease coordination, increase aggressive and reckless driving, impair cognitive function, or cause drowsiness.All of these effects can contribute to crash risk.Studies suggest that poly-drug use or combining alcohol and drugs can inflate the level of driver impairment and crashrisk. There is variation across jurisdictions in the frequency of testing suspected impaired drivers for drugs, consistencyin laboratory drug testing practices, and capacity of law enforcement personnel. Despite challenges in identifyingcausality and impairment, there is general consensus that many drugs impair driving. Preliminary data from an ongoingNHTSA study of alcohol and drug prevalence during the COVID-19 emergency found some significant increases in theprevalence of drugs detected in blood among fatally and seriously injured drivers, motorcyclists, and pedestrians whencomparing the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 to the second, third, or fourth quarters of 2020. As ofFebruary 2022, nearly three-quarters of states, including California, have legalized medical-use of cannabis productsand over one-third allow recreational cannabis, increasing concerns about traffic safety. According to the NationalInstitute on Drug Abuse, aside from alcohol, cannabis is the most frequently detected drug in drivers who are in crashes.Analyses from FARS presented in the drug-impaired program area include fatalities in crashes that involved a driverwho tested positive for a drug that could cause impairment. Analyses from SWITRS presented in this program area referto drug-involvement and include fatal and serious injuries where law enforcement reported the driver to be under theinfluence of drugs. Crashes in the program area are defined as where one or more drivers tested positive for a drug thatcould cause impairment or was reported as driving under the influence of drugs, depending on which data set is used.

There are many contributing factors in motor vehicle crashes. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) play a critical role post-crash to reduce fatalities and serious injuries. Recent studies show that an effective emergency trauma care system can improve survival from serious injuries by as much as 25 percent and county-level coordinated systems of trauma care can reduce crash fatalities rates as much as 50 percent. 

The United States Department of Transportation uses the Safe System Approach to bring traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero. The Safe System Approach recognizes human mistakes and vulnerabilities, and designs a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) names “Post-Crash Care” as a key element of a Safe System. Specifically, post-crash care refers to emergency first response and transport to medical facilities, as well as forensic analysis of the crash site and traffic incident management. 

The older adult population in the United States aged 65 and older is expected to almost double between 2016 and 2060, from 49 million to 95 million. In 2020, there were 6,549 people aged 65 and older killed in traffic crashes in the United States; this accounted for 16.9 percent of all traffic fatalities. Older drivers 65 and older involved in fatal crashes decreased by 9.8 percent between 2019 and 2020. 

As drivers age, physical and mental changes including reduced visual acuity, increased fragility, restricted movement, and cognitive impairment may directly and indirectly result in driving impairments.

The United States Department of Transportation uses the Safe System Approach to work towards zero roadway fatalities and serious injuries. The Safe System Approach recognizes human mistakes and vulnerabilities, and designs a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone. Designing streets to limit the impact of kinetic energy transfer in crashes may provide special benefit to older adults, as increased fragility exacerbates the severity of traffic injuries and the likelihood of death. 

Analyses presented in this section include fatal and serious injuries to drivers, passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and other non-motor vehicle occupants aged 65 and older. 

Crashes involving motorcycles are a major traffic safety concern in the United States. Since motorcyclists are susceptibleto injury during crashes, they comprise a disproportionate share of all injured and killed vehicle occupants. In 2020,motorcyclists comprised 14.4 percent of all traffic deaths in the US.

A speeding-related crash is defined as one where a driver is speeding, racing, driving too fast for the conditions, or driving in excess of the posted speed limit. In the United States, in 2020, over one in four (29.0 percent) fatalities involved speeding, a rate that increased after plateauing in the late 2010s, following a decline earlier in the decade. Speeding reduces a driver’s ability to steer safely around curves or objects, reduces the amount of time a driver has to react to a dangerous situation, and extends safe stopping distances. Analyses presented in the police traffic services program area refer to speeding-related fatal and serious injuries. 

The United States Department of Transportation uses the Safe System Approach to work towards zero roadway fatalities and serious injuries. Reducing kinetic energy is central to the Safe System approach. The Safe System Approach recognizes human mistakes and vulnerabilities, and designs a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone. Designing streets to limit the impact of kinetic energy transfer from speed-related crashes, as well as to protect people even when they make unsafe decisions, are examples of providing redundancies in the system to build forgiveness, limit speeding, and reduce fatal and serious injury.