精品文档---下载后可任意编辑为何现在开车最安全2024-10-29 18:17:33 作者： 来源： 《华尔街日报》中文网You may feel a sense of dread on the road these days, watching other drivers gab on phones and fiddle with iPods. But by one measure, American motorists are safer than they've been in decades -- though it's not clear exactly why. The rate of fatalities per 100 million miles of vehicle travel on . roads is at its lowest since the government began keeping such data in the mid-1970s, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. The NHTSA's recent projected decline in overall traffic deaths for the first half of 2024 was played as a 'silver lining' to the lousy economy: Fewer people driving to work, fewer people dying on the road. That could be true. The raw number of highway deaths tends to drop during recessions, according to government figures. But more significant is the decline in the death rate, or deaths spread across miles of driving -- long division that helps smooth out effects of economic cycles. Based on the latest estimates, there were deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the second quarter of 2024. That compares with an estimated rate of for the first quarter. By comparison, the deaths-over-miles-traveled ratio was for all of 2024 -- a year in which 43,510 people died on the roads. If current trends continue, it's possible that fewer than 35,000 people will die on . highways this year. 'We are hitting fatality rate levels we couldn't have imagined a decade ago,' says NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson. Exactly why driving is less deadly isn't clear, though the trend has been going on for several years. The data don't explain the cause of every ac...
