The New York Times [read free]: After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again. “…In the fall of 2022, Dr. Deborah Kuhls attended the annual meeting of the Governors Highway Safety Organization, in Louisville, Ky. In conversations with other researchers, she learned that the same behavioral patterns she had observed back in Nevada were playing out in nearly every state in the country, often at record-shattering scale. From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day. The fatality figures were somehow even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits…The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak. In a report published in November, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, concluded that S.U.V.s or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches — standard-issue specs for an American truck in 2023 — are 45 percent more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars…

In 2020 and 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has calculated, approximately a quarter of all fatal wrecks in the United States involved vehicles traveling above the posted speed limit; a significant percentage of the dead, whether passenger or driver, were not wearing seatbelts. In line with the trends documented by Kuhls in Nevada — and observed firsthand by Brown in Michigan — national intoxicated-driving rates have surged to the extent that one in every 10 arrests is now linked to a suspected D.U.I. And aggressive driving, defined by AAA as “tailgating, erratic lane changing or illegal passing,” factors into 56 percent of crashes resulting in a fatality. (Distressingly, this statistic does not cover the tens of thousands of people injured, often critically, by aggressive drivers, or the 550 people shot annually after or during road-rage incidents — or the growing number of pedestrians and cyclists deliberately targeted by incensed motorists.)..”