Good morning. A surge in vehicle crashes is disproportionately harming lower-income families and Black Americans. |
 | | A memorial in Albuquerque, where a 7-year-old was killed.Adria Malcolm for The New York Times |
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Vehicle crashes seem as if they might be an equal-opportunity public health problem. Americans in every demographic group drive, after all. If anything, poor families tend to rely more on public transportation and less on car travel. |
Yet vehicle deaths turn out to be highly unequal. Lower-income people are much more likely to die in crashes, academic research shows. The racial gaps are also huge — even bigger on a percentage basis than the racial gaps on cancer, according to the C.D.C. |
 | | Data understates all death rates because race is not recorded in all crashes. | Source: National Safety Council |
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The unequal toll from crashes is particularly notable now because the U.S. is experiencing an alarming increase in vehicle deaths. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, recently called it "a national crisis of fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways." And the toll is falling most heavily on lower-income Americans and Black Americans. |
The reasons for the increase remain somewhat mysterious, experts say. But the consequences are clear. More than 115 Americans have been dying on the roads on average every day this year. |
Today's newsletter will explore the likely explanations for the increase, as well as its unequal impact and the potential solutions. |
Not so long ago, the trend in car crashes was a good-news story. The death rate began to fall in the early 1970s, thanks in large part to the consumer movement started by Ralph Nader. Cars became safer. States passed seatbelt laws. Drunken driving became less common. The declines continued into the early 2010s, as airbags became standard and vehicles began to include technology to prevent crashes. |
 | | Source: National Safety Council |
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But the situation changed around 2015, with the death rate mostly rising over the next several years. One reason seems to be distracted driving. By 2015, two-thirds of U.S. adults owned a smartphone, up from almost none in 2006. |
The U.S. has also been less aggressive about cracking down on speeding than Britain and some other parts of Europe, and vehicles here tend to be larger. "The engorgement of the American vehicle," as Gregory Shill of the University of Iowa has called it, can kill pedestrians and people in smaller vehicles. These patterns help explain why death rates have fallen substantially more in other countries than in the U.S. during recent decades. |
As alarming as these trends were, the biggest increases have taken place more recently — since the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, as Covid was transforming daily life, vehicle crashes surged. By the start of this year, the death rate had jumped about 20 percent from prepandemic levels. It has been the sharpest increase since the 1940s. |
 | | Source: National Safety Council |
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How did Covid lead to more crashes? |
At first, researchers thought that emptier roads might be the main answer. Open roads can encourage speeding, and speeding can be fatal. But even as traffic returned to near-normal levels last year, traffic deaths remained high. That combination weakens the empty-road theory, as Robert Schneider, an urban-planning expert at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said. |
The most plausible remaining theories tend to involve the mental health problems caused by Covid's isolation and disruption. Alcohol and drug abuse have increased. Impulsive behavior, like running red lights and failing to wear seatbelts, also seems to have risen (as my colleague Simon Romero has reported). Many Americans have felt frustrated or unhappy, and it seems to have affected their driving. |
"They're a little bit less regulated — they might not be considering consequences," Kira Mauseth, a clinical psychologist at Seattle University, has said. Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University, put it this way to The Los Angeles Times: "You've been cooped up, locked down and have restrictions you chafe at." |
Ken Kolosh, who oversees data analysis at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit group, told me that researchers would need years to tease out all the causes. Confusingly, vehicle deaths did not surge in most other countries during the pandemic, suggesting that stress was a particularly American problem. "The world really felt upside down," Kolosh said. |
One encouraging data point that's consistent with this theory: The most recent data shows that vehicle deaths declined modestly this spring, as Covid restrictions continued to recede. |
 | | The scene of a collision in Manhattan this month.Dakota Santiago for The New York Times |
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As I mentioned above, vehicle fatalities have long been unequal. Poorer people are more likely to drive older cars, which can lack safety features. Low-income neighborhoods are also much more likely to have high-speed roads running through them. "We have systematically put these arterial roadways in areas where people had less political power to fight back," Rebecca Sanders, the founder of Safe Streets Research & Consulting, said. |
The pandemic probably exacerbated the gaps because many professionals have begun working from home, while many blue-collar Americans kept driving, biking or walking to work. Some lower-income workers also drive as part of their jobs. |
Even if the full explanation of the surge in crashes is murky, many experts believe that the most promising solutions remain clear. |
"Making streets safer doesn't require designing new solutions in laboratories," John Rennie Short, of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written. Jeffrey Michael, another expert, told The Washington Post, "This is an issue for which answers are known." |
Those answers include: stricter enforcement of speed limits, seatbelt mandates and drunken-driving laws; better designed roads, especially in poorer neighborhoods; more public transit; and further spread of safety features like automated braking. |
Continuing to leave behind the disruptions of Covid — and the loneliness and stress they have caused — seems likely to help, too. |
Related: Buttigieg and the Transportation Department plan to use new funding from Congress to reduce vehicle deaths. Among the many projects: an elevated path for pedestrians in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood; and new sidewalks, bike lanes and lighting near a mass transit station in Prince George's County, Md. |
 | | Donald Trump at a rally in Wisconsin this month.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times |
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 | | A memorial in Moscow for Daria Dugina.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters |
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- The Russian authorities accused Ukraine of carrying out the car bombing that killed Daria Dugina, 29, an ultranationalist commentator. Ukraine denied responsibility.
- Money for programs to help Ukrainians has been robust, but the war has drawn funding away from other crises, the U.N. said.
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Journalism like this is only possible with subscribers. |
 | | Submarine ownership can now be enjoyed by a successful orthodontist.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times |
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Lives Lived: The nuclear weapons expert David Kay led a fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He later resigned, and called on President George W. Bush to admit that the case for going to war had been flawed. Kay died at 82. |
| SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC |
A significant E.P.L. upset: Manchester United got its first win of the English Premier League season yesterday after new manager Erik ten Hag pulled Cristiano Ronaldo and club captain Harry Maguire from the starting lineup. On the losing end? Winless Liverpool, which now sits 16th in the E.P.L. table. |
Oh yeah, that other N.B.A. trade: The New York Knicks remain in talks to acquire the Utah Jazz star Donovan Mitchell. A return offer has yet to resonate. And the Memphis Grizzlies are the latest suitor to emerge in pursuit of Kevin Durant. |
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Every so often, a face-symmetry filter takes hold on social media. A popular TikTok version captures half of your face, then superimposes a mirror image of it over the other half, creating a perfectly symmetrical face that looks both familiar and uncanny. |
Humans have associated symmetry with beauty since antiquity, Rhonda Garelick writes in The Times. But the tools on social media allow us to see idealized versions of ourselves, and those likenesses can have harmful effects on our self-image. "You are viewing yourself incorrectly, and then you are bounced back into reality, where you look not like Gigi Hadid or whoever," Olivia Alicandri, a 22-year-old in New York, said. |
 | | Bryan Gardner for The New York Times. |
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The pangrams from yesterday's Spelling Bee were affirming, farming and framing. Here's today's puzzle. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
Matthew Cullen, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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