The new year started off averaging nearly one traffic fatality a day for almost two weeks – slightly behind the pace during the same period in 2024, according to the Connecticut Crash Data Repository, but still concerning for traffic safety advocates.
This week (Jan. 20-27) is also National Passenger Safety Week, a campaign urging passengers to speak up against unsafe driving practices and to help prevent crashes and save lives.
As such, we spoke with Eric Jackson, Ph.D., executive director of the Connecticut Transportation Institute, to find out more about what’s happening on the state’s roads and how it’s impacting not just drivers and passengers but pedestrians as well.
TRANSCRIPT:
Brian Scott-Smith: Dr. Jackson, ever so many thanks for joining us.
2024 was another bad year for deaths on Connecticut roads, according to statistics, I believe year-end [it was] 330, making it the second highest in four years. Can you give us a sense of What’s happening here?
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, a lot of the issues and problems that we’re seeing out on our roadways really stem from COVID.
Driver behavior really became dramatically worse during COVID. We see a lot of speeding, a lot of aggressive driving, and a lot of impaired driving. So that’s really exacerbated some of the issues that we have on our roadway. Even some of our roadway designs that may be fine under normal conditions, maybe some of those roadway designs can’t handle the speeds or can’t handle the impairment.
So, we’re seeing a lot more crashes actually occurring simply due to this kind of really poor driver behavior out on the roadways.
Brian Scott-Smith: Is the majority of what you’re seeing from the data, is it mainly speed related?
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, it’s a combination of speed and alcohol or drug related.
So, there’s not one kind of silver bullet or one contributing factor that we can really point to as the primary cause for a lot of this. So, the vast majority of our crashes, the vast majority of our fatalities, are angle crashes and angle collisions, that T-bone crash along with head on collisions.
So, where people are crossing the center line, going head on into traffic or coming up to an intersection and then running a red light or running a stop sign and then running into a side of another car. Those are the kind of the high energy high injury crashes that we’re seeing out on the roadways.
When looking at fatalities through. 2024. It looks like we had 64 pedestrian fatalities, 169 driver and passenger fatalities, 77 motorcycle fatalities, and 4 bicyclist killed. So, that means our pedestrian fatalities were actually up 14 percent over our 5 year average.
So, we saw a pretty significant increase in pedestrian fatalities, and then our motorcycle fatalities were up 27 percent over the previous five-year average. Our pedestrians and motorcycles, we saw a fairly substantial increase just in the number of individuals that were killed in 2024.
Brian Scott-Smith: Are we seeing more of these fatal traffic accidents occurring on like city and town roads rather than on our interstates?
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, when you start looking at how our network and transportation network is built out, we have our interstates are built to handle, high speeds, a lot of traffic, there’s offsets, there’s a lot of protections there.
So our interstates are actually not where you see the vast majority or a lot of our fatalities, where you see a lot of the injuries and fatalities is on our state routes, and then our local roads, those are the roads that aren’t designed to handle high speeds and roads where you have intersections and those intersection crashes are the ones that really cause the most damage and the most injuries.
That’s where you also see our pedestrians. So, a lot of our pedestrians are struck on our local roads or our state roads. And that’s where we see a lot of our pedestrian crashes and fatalities occurring.
Brian Scott-Smith: I know you said that the interstates aren’t the worst. You’ve just explained that to us, but we did see a lot of wrong way driving on interstate roads.
And as a result, the state has been spending significant amounts of money on wrong way alert systems. Are you able to comment at all on those and whether or not they seem to be doing the job?
Dr. Eric Jackson: Yeah, so actually I’ve had a lot of conversations with the Connecticut Department of Transportation. In 2024, we only saw six wrong way fatal crashes.
Unfortunately, that resulted in 13 fatalities. There were a couple where there were multiple fatalities in each one of those crashes. Our worst year was in 2022, where we had 13 total wrong way, fatal crashes and 23 fatalities. So, we’re down from where we were in talking with the D. O. T. They rolled out and actually they’re ahead of schedule and being able to roll out these wrong way detection alert systems and then notification systems.
One of the things that they are learning from this is that every week they will have two, three maybe even four alerts coming on where people are getting on the wrong way at sections or areas where it’ll be, the system will trigger, but nobody will ever call 9 1 1. So, it’s catching these people, they’re seeing that the lights are flashing and they’re actually self-correcting.
So, they didn’t even really understand or know how bad the problem actually was because there were all of these events that never were actually reported. But now that we have camera systems out there, they’re actually seeing how pervasive this problem actually is out on the roadways.
Brian Scott-Smith: What sort of age group seems to be most impacted maybe by traffic accidents, possibly gender or ethnicities?
Dr. Eric Jackson: So when we look at fatalities out on our roadways it’s typically around 73 percent male and 27 percent female. So, males are overrepresented in what we’re seeing in our fatality numbers and rates. Maybe that means males are more aggressive drivers maybe they’re not as safe drivers, more risky drivers.
We don’t know our insurance companies tells us yes, that males under the age of 25 are more risk-taking drivers. So that’s why their insurance premiums are higher than everyone else. But across age groups, we still see some of our younger drivers 16 to 25 or kind of a little bit overrepresented in terms of injuries and fatalities. But it’s not dramatic. These are spread across all different age groups. What we are seeing is on the pedestrian side, our older pedestrians are much more likely to be struck and killed in the roadway. They have mobility issues there. They walk slower, so they’re in the roadway much longer.
So, we’re overrepresented in terms of older pedestrians or vulnerable road users in our crash data.
Brian Scott-Smith: Are there any particular hotspot areas of the state that you’re seeing, or the data shows that seems to have more accidents than others?
Dr. Eric Jackson: . So, we track where crashes are occurring. It’s interesting when you start plotting it on a statewide map. It really follows along the 95, 91 corridors. But that’s also where our larger cities are.
So, Hartford, Bridgeport, Stamford these larger cities have much more traffic, many more cars. So , there’s much more chance of being involved in a crash. So that kind of our trends follow along. Where the cars are is where you see those individual crashes occurring. So, our larger cities have more crashes just by nature of more cars in those cities.
Brian Scott-Smith: Do you have any data that’s giving you insight as to when and what days accidents are happening more?
Dr. Eric Jackson: We’ve had a really interesting look at pedestrian data. , The pedestrian crashes tend to be more in the evening time.
So, once it starts getting dark, it’s harder to see those pedestrians. When we start looking at aggressive driving, there’s a really interesting trend that comes out in aggressive driving aggressive driving crashes tend to start stacking up through the week. So, Monday, they’re very low Tuesday and Wednesday.
They start to increase and then Thursday. We have this kind of dramatic increase in aggressive driving related crashes that take place and that’s the officer has indicated that crash was due to some type of aggressive behavior. We theorize that as the work week goes on, stress builds and people start driving much more aggressively once Friday hits the weekend is coming and that aggressive attitude drops.
So those road rage incidents kind of drop. After you get past Thursday, so very interesting trend throughout the week on when you see those type of crashes occurring
Brian Scott-Smith: And weather as well. Anything that you can tell us about the weather. I know it sounds a bit of an obvious one.
Is there any data on weather related incidents?
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, the weather is also interesting. A lot of people assume just because there’s ice on the roadway or snow on the roadway, we’re going to see this massive spike in fatalities. What actually happens is the opposite. Ice may be on the roadways.
It may be really snowy. Those type of crashes, those really serious injury producing crashes, drop dramatically. If we have a year where we have a really bad winter, our fatality numbers are going to be much lower. Primarily because people don’t travel as much, people drive more cautiously, they drive slower and you don’t have those high energy crash events that actually end up in a fatality.
Brian Scott-Smith: How many police officers or state troopers have we seen unfortunately get struck in the road? Is there any data on that?
Dr. Eric Jackson: I was just looking up some stats on what we call our work zones or construction zones.
And it looks like over the last 10 years. There’s been 23 fatalities that have occurred within these work and construction zones. We actually have staff here at the center whose cousin was a tow truck driver, pulled over on the side of the road trying to get disabled vehicle off the roadway, and he was struck and killed.
These type of crashes do occur. Our first responders are very vulnerable out on the roadways. You’ll see troopers that are sitting on the side of the roadway with a car pulled over. What we find is those flashing lights on the back of a police trooper vehicle act like a moth to a flame.
If a driver’s impaired, they actually start steering towards those flashing lights. It’s a very dangerous situation for law enforcement on the side of the road, so a lot of times they want to get off the road as fast as possible to get out of kind of that danger zone.
Brian Scott-Smith: 2025 seems to, in your words, got off to start. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, every Thursday here at the center we work with the Connecticut Department of Transportation. We compile fatalities for the previous week. So as of January 14th, I believe we’re already at 14 fatalities.
So essentially a fatality a day. It’s how the average has worked out. Nine of those fatalities were passengers or drivers in a vehicle. And then five of those fatalities , were, Pedestrians. So, we’re already at a third of our fatalities are pedestrian or vulnerable road user related.
We’ve seen a couple of those pedestrian fatalities on interstates. And that’s because people, their car will become disabled, they will get out of their car and then they will end up getting struck. So, what you want to do if your car is disabled on the side of the road, stay in your car.
Call 911. Unless your car is on fire, sit in your vehicle. It’s the safest place to be. Don’t try and get out and change your tire. The DOT has roving patrols that are looking for safety issues. The safest place you can be is inside the protection of your vehicle.
Brian Scott-Smith: Bit of a 64 million question, but what do you think we need to do more of here in the state to try and reverse this trend. I know you mentioned about COVID. I did a quick Google search before I came on this call to look at the other five New England states. And I can’t categorically state I’ve got the most accurate figures, but Connecticut seems to be the worst out of all of them.
Dr. Eric Jackson: So, Connecticut, unfortunately, tends to be in the top few states when it comes to impaired driving. Connecticut has a culture of impaired driving and impaired fatalities. I think three or four years ago, we were actually number three in the country for impaired driving fatalities only surpassed by I think it was D.C. and Montana. So impaired driving has always been an issue. Covid made it much worse. People started experimenting with drugs and alcohol. That’s got into driving. culture. We legalized recreational cannabis, and we don’t really have a good way of monitoring that and enforcing that out on our roadways.
And it really comes back to enforcement as well. During COVID a lot of the law enforcement agencies were told to stand down and don’t enforce , as vigorously as they were. So that led to some of these behaviors really starting to ramp up enforcement has started to increase back but we still don’t have the number of troopers, the number of police officers that we need out on the roadways.
Their numbers are down, nobody wants to be a police officer anymore and really getting that enforcement out there is really the only deterrent that we have to have people stop speeding and doing aggressive driving out on our roadways. other than automated enforcement, which is the state is moving to.
So automated speed enforcement cameras, automated red light running cameras. This is where we are headed due to the bad behaviors out on the roadway as a way to try and curb those behaviors and improve safety and try and save lives.
Brian Scott-Smith: Do you also think that drivers education in this country maybe needs to change?
Do we need to change the way that we train, everybody who wants to learn to drive?
Dr. Eric Jackson: That is a great question because I have a 16 year old and he has now started the driver’s education process. I have been personally very underwhelmed by the driver’s education that he is getting at this point.
He just finished four of his two hour in person driving sessions. We’re in the process now of going through 16 different two hour classes per se. Pre COVID, those classes were in person. You had interaction with an instructor. Now these classes are being hosted via Zoom.
The content I’ve sat in on a couple definitely needs to be updated from the kind of course that he is going through. And it’s expensive. It was over $700 for me to enroll him in driver’s education. We have low income families that just they can’t afford that. So, we’re having drivers out on the roadway that have never gone through any driver education program.
Because they’re just delaying when they get their driver’s license to get past the graduated driver’s licensing program. So, in my opinion the whole driver education process, in Connecticut could really use a reboot and a revamp.
Brian Scott-Smith: Just to amplify that a little bit again, is there any data that you have that says how many people, have been pulled over who had no license?
Dr. Eric Jackson: Going a little bit back to the driver’s education piece and where this kind of goes the graduated driver’s licensing law in Connecticut was Passed in 2007, 2008.
As soon as that was passed, we saw teen lives lost drop by 50%. There was a dramatic decrease in lives lost for our teen drivers. We’re starting to see an increase, so we’re starting to see teen driver fatalities over the last, 15 years . They were fairly stable, still going down, but now we’re starting to see teen driver fatalities start to spike and start to grow exponentially, so whether or not those are, teens that are just going out and driving without a license not going through the driver’s education program, or maybe our driver’s education program hasn’t caught up with technology that’s out on the roadway. There’s older drivers out on the roadway that, They don’t even understand what their new car does and what are the features of the new car and how to drive a new car.
There’s so many bells and whistles inside of cars now that could be dramatically distracting for somebody that doesn’t understand why their car is beeping at them incessantly.
Brian Scott-Smith: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the things that are supposed to be safety features potentially could be not as safe as the car manufacturers would have wanted them to be then?
Dr. Eric Jackson: Absolutely. We see a lot of people that will turn off their lane departure warnings. I am one of those. On the rural roads in Connecticut, there’s no lane markings or striping’s. That car is constantly beeping at me, so I will turn that feature off simply because I can’t take sometimes you gotta crowd the center line a little bit on the roadways in Connecticut because the roads are so narrow.
And my car does not like that when I crowd the center line.
Brian Scott-Smith: Dr. Eric Jackson. Thank you for the interview.
