The Evolution of Transport Safety in the US

Abstract

While transportation in the US provides the highest level of mobility in the world, it does create a set of unintended consequences. A major such consequence derives from the 6.5 million transportation accidents, which result in over 3 million injuries and 43 000 fatalities annually. Transportation crashes account for about half of all the accidental deaths in the country (table 1). Motor vehicle accidents are the major cause of death among Americans in the age group 15–24 and are also responsible for as many pre-retirement years lost (about 1.2 million years annually) as cancer and heart disease (figure 1). The full economic costs of transport accidents to US society — direct costs sustained by injured persons and their insurers including costs related to health care, property damage, and market productivity losses as well as public costs in the form of health care expenditures, income tax revenue losses, and public assistance expenses — over the lifetime of individuals injured or killed in 1990 has been estimated at over $135 billion (USDOT NHTSA, 1993). Transportation-related accidents are clearly a major public health problem in the U S.