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Tell your story: transit saves lives by reducing car crashes

We’ve grown complacent about the wave of deaths and injuries from car crashes.

There are 3 million people every year who are injured in a car crash. That’s more people than every resident of the City of Chicago injured.

And the heart-breaking number: 43,000 families are devastated every year when one of their loved one die in a car crash.

That’s five people every hour, every day, all year long — killed in a car crash.

Think about getting that phone call from the police department. “There’s been an accident….”

Five people every hour. Every day. All year long.

Putting aside the emotional devastation, think about the economic impact. It’s hard to get an absolutely accurate accounting of the economic costs of all those car crashes, but AAA did their best with a brand new report called Crashes v. Congestion: What’s the Cost to Society and came up with $164 billion. Every year.

That is a lot of money. That’s a lot of medical care, property damage, lost wages, emergency and police services. And that’s what we all pay for because of the wave of deaths and injuries from car crashes.

Triple A (originally the American Automobile Association) is not often a transit ally. But their report helps to make the case that transit is a literal life-saver.

The best way to reduce car crashes is to reduce car driving. According to the report, between 1980 and 1999, highway route miles increased 1.5% while vehicle miles traveled increased 76%. In other words, we didn’t build any more highways since we can’t afford to do so anymore, but we used highways almost twice as much. And with all that driving comes a lot of crashes.

What’s the best way to reduce car driving (or, as the policy wonks put it, vehicle miles traveled)?

Transit.

More and better transit to neighborhoods that have never seen it before.

It’s a literal life-saver.

The cost of crashes, according to the report, is between 25 cents and 41 cents for every vehicle mile traveled.

Which is another way of saying that transit saves society between 25 cents and 41 cents for every one mile of driving we eliminate from one rider.

That is most of the subsidy for a rider for more fares in the country.

In other words, we save lives by paying people to take the bus or the train. And in the process, we save a ton of money.

We need to tell our story. If transit agencies can’t tell policymakers and civic society how transit is an incredible investment in saving lives, using the cost of car crashes as our evidence, who will?

So here is your homework, transit leader: read the AAA report. Look up what it says about your region. And then hold a press conference comparing the cost of car crashes in your region with the cost of transit and call for much greater investment in transit to bring down the cost of those car crashes.

If you need help, email me at [email protected]  (And if you’re going to the American Public Transportation Association’s Legislative Conference in Washington this week as I am, please say hello!)

This is a fresh story, so let’s earn some attention.