To reduce fatalities by 2030, we need to look beyond vehicles

By Jessica Cicchino
Senior Vice President, Behavior and Infrastructure Research, IIHS

More than a dozen years since joining IIHS, I still struggle to answer when people ask me what I do for a living. “Have you ever seen a commercial that calls a car an IIHS Top Safety Pick? I work there,” I say. “Oh, wow, you run crash tests?” they respond. Well, no.

For much of the public, IIHS is synonymous with vehicle safety research, thanks to the success of our ratings program. Crash testing may be the best-known part of our work — and yes, it’s pretty cool — but it’s far from our only focus. I direct the Institute’s research on road user behavior and infrastructure, evaluating things like road design, traffic laws and how drivers interact with their vehicles. I may be biased, but I believe these things are just as important as vehicle safety testing. To make travel safer, particularly in the near term, it is essential that we find ways to rein in risky driving and improve the design of our roads.

IIHS vehicle ratings have driven automakers to make big improvements in their vehicles. When we first started running our original moderate overlap frontal crash test in 1995, few of the vehicles we tested earned a good rating. Now, all new vehicles have that level of protection. Vehicles with a good rating in this test have driver fatality rates in head-on crashes with like vehicles that are 46% lower than the poor-rated vehicles of 30 years ago.

But while vehicles are safer now than ever before, traffic fatalities in 2022 were nearly 30% higher than they were in 2014. Risky behaviors like speeding, alcohol impairment and failure to wear a seat belt have contributed to a growing share of fatalities, wiping out many of the gains from safer vehicles. At the same time, the wins in vehicle safety haven’t benefited all road users equally. Deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists — people who aren’t protected by a vehicle’s structure — have seen their fatalities rise even more sharply, by 49% from 2014 to 2022.

Thanks to crash avoidance technologies such as automatic emergency braking, vehicle safety improvements are starting to benefit road users outside the vehicle. But such improvements are a long game. The average passenger vehicle is nearly 12 years old, which means that the latest safety features in new cars can take decades to reach most drivers. We need solutions that can start working faster.

Recently, IIHS-HLDI announced a new vision we’re calling 30x30: a 30% reduction in fatalities by 2030. To get to 30x30, we’ll need to take steps that can have an immediate effect — things like deploying safety cameras or installing quick-build infrastructure. When Maryland’s Montgomery County put speed safety cameras on its residential roads, the share of vehicles that were speeding by more than 10 mph dropped by 70% in about six months. Next door in Washington, D.C., putting up bollards and rubber speed bumps to slow left-turning drivers reduced conflicts with pedestrians by over 70% a few months after they were installed. Such solutions can bring real progress if we implement them at scale.

Persuading legislators to enact laws or transportation departments to make infrastructure changes can be challenging but could still outpace the changeover of the vehicle fleet. Redesigning a road can take years, but it usually does not take decades. If stronger state laws governing alcohol-impaired driving, seat belt use or distracted driving are passed in the next five years, they could have immediate impacts on risky behavior.

In support of our 30x30 vision, IIHS will work with the stakeholders that can make these faster wins. We aren’t a lobbying organization, but we can support advocates seeking stronger laws in their states by providing them with evidence and tools to help them make their case to legislators. We can work with states and communities to demonstrate what works so that others can follow their example. We can encourage others to act with urgency to fight for changes more quickly.

We also need to push back against dangerous legislative trends. Today eight U.S. states have highways with speed limits of 80 mph or higher. Increases in top speed limits on our highways have cost about 46,000 lives since the early 1990s. To put that in perspective, the number of lives lost due to rising speed limits equals more than half of the lives that have been saved by frontal airbags through 2019. Meanwhile, 33 states lack all-rider helmet requirements for motorcyclists. The absence of such laws has cost 22,000 lives since 1976.

IIHS will continue to play the long game of improving vehicle safety while aggressively pushing for more immediate solutions. Improving vehicles today is an investment in safety beyond 2030 as part of our long-term path to zero fatalities. Vehicle technology like intelligent speed assist and driver monitoring systems have tremendous potential to keep drivers from speeding, driving while alcohol-impaired, driving unbelted or losing focus. Vehicles can be designed with vulnerable road users in mind by adding crash avoidance systems that are better at detecting them, improving the ability of drivers to spot people outside the vehicle, and designing front ends that are more forgiving to pedestrians and cyclists involved in crashes.

Still, the stunning rise in fatalities over the past decade shows that technology and vehicle design changes on their own will never be enough. Even as vehicle improvements spread through the fleet, we’ll need to maintain and expand on any gains we’ve made in the areas of infrastructure and policy. Tackling our road safety challenges from all sides is the essence of the Safe System approach — and the only way to achieve both 30x30 and lasting progress toward zero fatalities.