Driving during the pandemic

Five years ago I did a post on how driving had become radically safer per mile driven in America over the course of the 100 years or so when car ownership gradually became a mass phenomenon. This was no doubt due to many factors, including automobile safety technology improving, mandatory seat belt and airbag laws (a subset of the first factor), greatly improved emergency medical technology, advances in communications to optimize that factor, stricter drunk driving laws, and the breakup of Led Zeppelin after John Bonham’s death from alcohol poisoning.

During the pandemic, there was a lot of speculation on how it was affecting driving, both in that people assumed there must have been a lot less driving during it with the increase of remote work/work from home, and that driving was probably getting more dangerous per mile driven, because enforcement of traffic laws fell off noticeably in 2020.

We have some numbers now, and the TL;DR version is this: Miles traveled by car dropped off significantly in 2020, but bounced back completely to the pre-pandemic level in 2021. Meanwhile, there does appear to have been a significant increase in traffic fatalities in the 2020-2022 period (stats for 2023 are not yet available).

So there was a drop off in driving quite briefly, but that effect disappeared almost immediately, despite everyone in America being forbidden to leave their homes during the first year of the Biden administration, which seems counter-intuitive. And driving did become noticeably more dangerous, statistically speaking.

There’s a larger story here in which to contextualize all this, which is captured by the following striking statistics:

Total percentage decline in fatalities per miles driven in the USA between the beginning and end of a decade:

1940-49: 35%

1950-59: 29%

1960-69: No change

1970-79: 30%

1980-89: 35%

1990-1999: 25%

2000-2009: 25%

2010-2019: No change

I mean that’s a pretty striking pattern, no? You have a very consistently large decline over the course of every decade, ranging from 25% to 35%, with two massive outliers, in which you have no decline at all. I suspect the explanation for the 1960s is almost purely demographic/economic: this is the decade when the first half of the baby boom started driving, which, combined with post-war affluence, probably produced a very marked increase in both the percentage and gross total of teenage drivers, who are notoriously dangerous to themselves and others.

Nothing at all similar was going on in 2010-19 however, so what’s the explanation there? Increasing vehicle size? Declining norms in terms of obeying traffic laws, because Soros put a black foreigner in the White House, before Freedom was restored? (In all seriousness I do think adherence to traffic laws was declining before the pandemic, although the pandemic made it very noticeably worse). More driving under the influence, related to the whole deaths of despair trend?

We did see a 10.5% decline in miles driven in 2020, but essentially all that decline disappeared in 2021. Meanwhile, over the three years of the pandemic, fatalities per miles driven increased by 19%, in comparison to the 2010-2019 period, which seems both statistically and socially significant.

Anyway, there are various things going on here, perhaps related to what has been referred to as general social enshittification, which is a subject that deserves its own post.