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I'd be interested in better numbers on the number of licensed drivers. The absolute number of licenses per individual have been ticking up. But some of these statistics... Well, it's easy to count the absolute number of registered licenses, but people can technically drive without a valid license, and people can also have licenses in multiple states.
Now, according to the numbers I have, the number of licenses has been ticking up. And the number of licenses per capita has been ticking up. From .89 in 2020 to .91 in 2024...
Now naively, increasing the number of drivers shouldn't change that deaths/hundred thousand miles number- but when you already have 90% of people driving, 1 more percentage point probably doesn't represent the best drivers getting licenses. The more separated society is, the less public transit there is, the more people are forced to drive to work to survive, the worse the bottom of the bell curve of drivers on the streets is going to look. I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.
This is all just a hypothesis though. Really I'd want a curated regional dataset of accidents with information about when those involved got their licenses. Without that it's hard to correlate. It's likely the accidents aren't uniformly increasing, but are localized to some areas more than others. All in all, a better dataset would let us make much better hypotheses.
I have sometimes wondered if there are people who have started driving instead of using public transit simply because they fear that they'll catch Covid on the train or the bus.
In the USA? Outside of New York and the Bay Area everyone already drove. Driving in New York is ridiculously impractical, and besides, everyone who was that worried about Covid just refused to leave the house.
Now some people driving instead of taking public transportation because public transportation imposed a bunch of extra bullshit around Covid policy seems at least mathematically possible, but I’d bet the ven diagram of ‘people bothered by useless Covid bullshit enough to change their habits’ and ‘people who took public transportation when parking at their destination cost less than $15’ is two circles.
Not only that, but the kind of person who is worried about covid enough to drive rather than use public transport is probably the kind of person who tends to be more cautious in general and not the kind of madman reckless driver who goes around causing fatalities. Some people argue that overly cautious drivers tend to cause more accidents compared to normal drivers due to an unpredictability borne out of timidness. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is I'd suspect that the resulting collisions are more of the fender bender/rear ender type than the stuff that causes fatalities.
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Isn't this all pretty marginal stuff? How could it explain a > 20% increase in a single year? In recent decades, the rate decreased smoothly, and almost every year until 2020, and then bam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
Maybe, maybe not. I'm skeptical of my own hypothesis without more numbers. But if a bunch of high risk drivers started driving again circa Covid, who were previously getting around in other ways (because they know they're bad at driving), we would expect those people to get into a disproportionate number of accidents per mile driven.
These 1-2% licensing numbers are probably the wrong ones to look at for this hypothesis though. What we really want is the number of infrequent drivers that became more frequent drivers. Or better yet, miles driven sorted by driver insurance risk profile. These people may have largely already had licenses.
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