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Traffic deaths aren’t up because of George Floyd

Vox writes about our recent increase in traffic deaths:

According to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 police officers, nearly 60 percent said they were less likely to stop a vehicle for violating traffic laws than they were prior to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired nationwide protests over police brutality, and the pandemic disrupted usual enforcement practices.

....The fact that traffic stops are decreasing while deaths are rising doesn’t necessarily mean that one is causing the other, because correlation does not equal causation, as any good statistics teacher will tell you....Some experts, however, think there’s an obvious link. Enforcement efforts that are high-visibility and focused on safety are shown to reduce risky driving. Experts believe the opposite might also be true.

Here's the problem: this doesn't match the data. Here are traffic fatalities over the past ten years:

Traffic fatalities jumped suddenly in the second quarter of 2020 and then flattened out at their new higher level.

It's possible this is related to the George Floyd protests, but it seems unlikely since those protests only started at the tail end of the second quarter of 2020. Nor is it likely related to fewer traffic stops. Those didn't suddenly drop off in the second quarter of 2020 and, in any case, can't have an effect until drivers realize that enforcement is down. That takes a while.

By far the most likely explanation is COVID, which exploded precisely in the second quarter of 2020. But why? Why did COVID suddenly make us into reckless drivers? And why have we remained reckless drivers even as COVID has waned?

The truth is that none of this really makes sense. It's unlikely that the sudden spike in traffic deaths has anything to do with George Floyd, and it's more or less impossible that it has anything to do with reductions in traffic stops. It is likely that it's related to COVID, but that just pushes the question a level deeper. What does COVID have to do with driving?

This is, for now, an unsolved mystery.

51 thoughts on “Traffic deaths aren’t up because of George Floyd

  1. illilillili

    Around here, Covid greatly reduced driving and greatly changed the reasons for driving. Although I would have expected most of those changes to have gone away during 2022.

    Explaining why traffic deaths are up in Summer vs Winter might also shed light on this question.

    1. memyselfandi

      The obvious effect of seasonality is the same cause of seasonality of gas prices. Summer has more (recreational) driving.

      1. Salamander

        Re: normalized. Just as acting out on board aircraft seems to have continued, post pandemic. The veneer of civilization seems to be thinner than we realized.

    1. jakewidman

      My first thought too. I had commented to others myself that drivers were very slow to get used to the roads being crowded again.

      Pedestrians were also slow to get used to their being a bunch of cars on the road again. I wonder if pedestrian deaths are up too.

  2. pingus

    My completely unscientific observation is that there’s been a significant increase in commercial traffic - UPS, FedEx, Amazon, door dash, etc., and a lot of these people are poorly trained and drive like maniacs

    1. Yikes

      I like this. The number of previous amateurs who became pro delivery drivers shot up in Covid, and has not really come back down as now delivery drivers are standard.

      The uptick is caused by the number of drivers distracted while looking for an address.

      Congrats pingus.

    2. painedumonde

      I believe this has definitely a place in the explanation. In the past three years I've noticed a marked increase in u-turns, when prior to that it was extremely rare. When they did happen (when I witnessed them), it was a bat out of hell type of maneuver. This is probably tied to driving in the gig economy as well.

  3. bmore

    I have read that during covid, streets were emptier and people got used to speeding and driving more recklessly, and they haven't returned to their prior habits. Idk if this is true, but I live in a fairly large city and regularly see people drive through red lights, turn right from the left lane, pass people to drive through a red light, speed and zip in and out of lanes on the highway, etc. It seems to be worse than in pre-covid times

    1. cephalopod

      I also think the experience of driving fast on empty streets played a role.

      I've seen more people driving at extremely high speeds than pre-pandemic - over 100 on roads marked 65. And brake-checking has become much more common. For a while it seemed like every time I got on the freeway I'd see someone break check another car ahead of me.

      Marijuana use is also up, and using both alcohol and marijuana at the same time can make people feel less impaired than they actually are. Not great for driving safety.

    2. Altoid

      I remember seeing quite a bit of comment at the time about how people were driving much faster and much less carefully on roads that were way less crowded.

      And I don't think cops making fewer stops was about George Floyd, as the timing indicates. Early in the pandemic cops, like everybody else, wanted (were instructed?) to avoid talking directly to anyone else unless they really had to. People running around in their cars could take off masks. So which cops wanted to stop occasional isolated cars going too fast on empty streets, just to talk to some unmasked driver and take a chance on getting exposed to covid? Who wanted to be that kind of a hero?

      This seems much more likely an explanation to me. We didn't have vaccines before early 2021 and getting original covid was some serious shit.

      Maybe, if there really is a "George Floyd" connection, it influenced cops not to resume the kind of traffic enforcement they did in the before times. But they're using his name in vain. Floyd wasn't caught in a traffic stop. Several others were in the period around then, across several states, and many of them ended up getting shot for dwb. So maybe our law enforcement big thinkers should try coming up with a safer as well as more effective model of traffic control?

      [I know they're pointing to the protests against police brutality so part of that paragraph isn't really on point. But the timing question remains.]

        1. Altoid

          Bingo-- lots of unavoidable exposure in other aspects of the job, no rational reason to seek it out with more discretionary traffic stops. Hard not to think about it that way, if it was me.

  4. ucgoldenbears

    This is misleading because there was such a drastic shift in miles driven. I don't think you can really tell from this data.

  5. KinersKorner

    Until Covid I never drove more then a mile or two daily ( to the train and back). Now I drive 9 miles to a local office. I am sure there are many others like me and volume is up. Plus those that never went back to trains from Covid. More volume more accidents?

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      Until Covid I never drove more then a mile or two daily ( to the train and back). Now I drive 9 miles to a local office. I am sure there are many others like me and volume is up.

      I don't understand this argument at all. Why are you driving more than you did before the pandemic? You're claiming it's a widespread phenomenon?

      1. kaleberg

        According to a number of recent articles, a lot of people got used to driving to work during the COVID slowdown. The traffic was lighter, and they were worried about exposure to infection while in transit. Apparently, a lot of people just got used to driving even as traffic picked up and commutes have gotten much worse. It didn't help that transit service was cut and took a while to get back up to speed.

        P.S. If your commute involved a Puget Sound ferry, good luck. If there is a ferry version of COVID, it's been going around. It doesn't help that the ships are getting near end of life.

  6. Adam Strange

    Traffic deaths have remained at their higher level, even after the Covid lockdown ended and driving conditions returned to "normal".

    Maybe long Covid has, on average, made people just slightly stupider, or less focused on their driving tasks.

    I've had Covid twice, and it sure as hell didn't make me smarter, nor has it improved my ability to focus on routine tasks.

    1. memyselfandi

      This would be consistent with the lead gas hypothesis for crime statistics. Covid brain fog is a real thing. It could be that every instance of a covid infection causes an extremely minor (essentially below the normal background noise) amount of brain damage just as it causes permanent heart damage.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        It could be that every instance of a covid infection causes an extremely minor (essentially below the normal background noise) amount of brain damage

        I sure hope not. That probably means the majority of our species (and probably 80%+ of Americans) have suffered brain damage.

  7. James B. Shearer

    "It's possible this is related to the George Floyd protests, but it seems unlikely since those protests only started at the tail end of the second quarter of 2020. ..."

    You need to look at weekly data not quarterly data to see this. See for example the graph in this post by Steve Sailer. Regardless of your opinion of Sailer is that a correct depiction of the weekly data?

    1. memyselfandi

      From the dishonorable lying sack of excrement "Second, I didn’t bother adjusting for the modest population change during these years." And by modest, he means 33% of the increase in murders. And of course, non lying scum would point out that covid was a much more important factor that that the piece of filth completely leaves out. Note, the scumbag puts the line indicating the beginning of covid before the first known US death, and places the line indicating the floyd effect on floyd's death. if you assume the floyd effect is the result of people adjusting their behavior as a result of police doing less policing, the spike occurs before the floyd effect could commence and is solely consistent with a covid cause.

      1. James B. Shearer

        "...Note, the scumbag puts the line indicating the beginning of covid before the first known US death ..."

        The first known US Covid death was apparently on or before February 6, 2020. See here.

  8. somebody123

    it makes perfect sense. the various covid health mandates went unenforced. people realized that unless an authority figure was standing over them, they didn’t have to mask up or distance or get vaccinated- and they had a great many media figures telling them to disobey. this lead to a general realization you can disobey pretty much any law if a cop isn’t right there- we mostly depend on self-enforcement, especially for things like traffic law. covid broke the illusion that the police are capable of enforcing the law (as opposed to showing up afterwards and assigning blame, which is they actually do.) and here we are.

  9. different_name

    I've wondered before about this. Covid also seems to have made airline travelers crankier and more hostile.

    I can't imagine how, but I note that correlation, too.

  10. rick_jones

    It's possible this is related to the George Floyd protests, but it seems unlikely since those protests only started at the tail end of the second quarter of 2020. Nor is it likely related to fewer traffic stops. Those didn't suddenly drop off in the second quarter of 2020, and in any case can't have an effect until drivers realize that enforcement is down. That takes a while.

    Looks like this post is short a couple charts.

  11. jte21

    Wait, cops are literally claiming that they're avoiding traffic stops since the George Floyd incident because....they're concerned a routine traffic stop may require them to kneel on the neck of an unarmed, subdued Black guy until he dies? And they just can't risk that these days, what with all the camera phones out there and the wokeness shit?

    I wouldn't be surprised. But that's on cops, not on the George Floyd protests.

    1. ColBatGuano

      Cops have basically been sitting on their asses ever since the protests because they were offended that people were questioning their rectitude.

  12. jte21

    Just anecdotally btw, my wife and I returned to LA for a couple of days in spring 2022 for a family gathering and were driving the 405 through Long Beach and the South Bay late one night. It was Saturday, so traffic was typically heavy, but not stop-and-go. The number of speeding, aggressive drivers in those stupid tuned-up rally-type cars weaving in and out of traffic, racing one another, nearly causing multiple-car pile-ups with every swerve lane to lane, was insane. I'd lived in LA for years and never seen anything like it. I was driving white-knuckled the whole way.

    Not a CHiP in sight, either, the whole time. We tend to forget, too, Covid was the number one killer of cops 2020-22, mostly because a lot of them refused vaccines. Maybe they just dont' have enought personnel to focus on routine traffic enforcement anymore.

  13. memyselfandi

    "The truth is that none of this really makes sense. " The consensus at the time of the spike in traffic deaths in 2020 was it was entirely due to covid. Covid caused less traffic congestion, and thus higher driving speeds. Less congestion means fewer but more deadly crashes. Speeds means deaths. We still have less congestion which means one would expect more deaths. (though there needs to be additional explanation for why deaths didn't reduce to a higher level, i.e. we started driving more aggressively and this is a permanent change in behavior.)

  14. raoul

    Interesting, in reading the commentary, the number of miles drive went down during Covid, so the ratio went up. The miles that went down were slow congestion traffic where fatalities are much rarer. So basically nothing has really changed. That actually sounds very plausible, at least as a factor. Now if someone could explain the murder rate increase during Covid.

      1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

        I agree that it doesn't *excuse* the higher rates, but it absolutely does *explain* the higher rates. Driving at 75MPH is far more dangerous that driving in a traffic jam at 10MPH. When traffic jams vanished during COVID, a higher fraction of our driving was at more dangerous speeds.

        As usual, the key to understanding this is to disregard the statements from cops. They lie.

  15. dmcantor

    I think my experience on the Washington DC Beltway in 2020 explains this 100%. There was much less traffic than usual, because people were staying home. As always, there was zero traffic enforcement. Average speed went up at least 20 mph, and the fastest cars were pushing 100.

  16. Toofbew

    I attribute the crazy driving to Trump lawlessness. He breaks laws on an an almost daily basis and brags about it. What happened to the IRS audit? What happened to the emoluments rules? Wire fraud, anyone? Anyway, I noticed reckless monster trucks more and more on the West Coast highways during COVID (and during the Trump “administration”) and now after peak COVID. In WA state there are very few police patrolling I-5, the busiest highway in the state. Big trucks routinely drive 75 mph. If I drive 75 in a 70 zone I routinely have to pull over to let someone going 85 go by. Locally, there have been many one-car crashes and some serious inattentive driver crashes (probably looking at their mobile phone). Back to the cops, I see them occasionally, but unless there’s a chance to beat or shoot someone, they seem bored.

  17. Doctor Jay

    It has been noted that total miles driven dropped by quite a bit. I would think that this drop also introduced a bias. That is, the more cautious people stayed home, leaving the roads to people who were a bit less cautious.

  18. Jasper_in_Boston

    It's unlikely that the sudden spike in traffic deaths has anything to do with George Floyd,

    We didn't see a sudden spike in traffic deaths, at least not according to Kevin's graph, which doesn't show absolute numbers.

    We saw, rather, an increase in the death rate.

    As others have noted, this is surely due to composition effects: low speed, traffic jam driving is reduced because of fewer rush hour commuters, leaving the total sample (all US auto driving) statistically more dangerous (because of the higher average speed).

    The one thing I do find a bit puzzling, though is: wouldn't we have seen some decrease in death rate as traffic volumes increased, post-lockdown? Traffic many not have returned to 2019 levels, but it's a lot higher than it was in early to mid 2020, right?

    But perhaps one further compositional effect is: high SES workers are more likely to be able to enjoy work-from-home employment, and such persons are statistically safer, better drivers.

  19. Master Slacker

    Having just gone through COVID I will testify that one of its symptoms is increased aggressive behavior. Now if only I could pay attention long enough to create a study. :/

  20. mistermeyer

    People started driving like maniacs during COVID. I recall reading about it in the Sacramento Bee, and personal experience confirms it. Nobody at the time attributed it to George Floyd.

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