The Crash

Some more bad news - but also some good news - about the current recession and its effects on traffic.

More than two years after seven people were killed after a bus driver mistook a poorly marked HOV exit ramp for a through lane in Atlanta, the road signs still have not been upgraded and another bus nearly made the same mistake last week. A bus carrying a high school band from Michigan to a competition in Orlando took the ramp Thursday morning, thinking it was a continuation of I-75’s southbound HOV lane. The driver realized it was an exit in time to brake to a stop at the top of the ramp. A second bus followed onto the exit also believing it was a continuation of the HOV lane, and also stopped in time.

In the March 2007 accident, a driver for the bus carrying the Bluffton University baseball team didn’t realize the HOV ramp was actually an exit until it was too late to stop. The vehicle crashed through a barrier wall and fell to the highway below, killing five baseball team members, the driver and his wife.

More than two years after that crash, a spokesman for the Georgia DOT acknowledged that the agency was still working to fix the signage. “The footings for the new signs just went in,” he said. “The signs will be completed by summer.”

But an economic downturn can also have a bright side: U.S. highway deaths in 2008 fell to their lowest level since John F. Kennedy was president. The recession and $4 per gallon gas meant people drove less to save more. Experts also cited record high seat belt use, tighter enforcement of drunken driving laws and the work of advocacy groups that encourage safer driving habits.

Preliminary figures show that 37,313 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year. That's 9.1 percent lower than the year before, when 41,059 died, and the fewest since 1961, when there were 36,285 deaths. A different measure, also offering good news, was the fatality rate, the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. It was 1.28 in 2008, the lowest on record. A year earlier it was 1.36.

In the past, tough economic times have brought similar declines in roadway deaths. Fatalities fell more than 16 percent from 1973 to 1974 as the nation dealt with the oil crisis and inflation. Highway deaths dropped nearly 11 percent from 1981 to 1982 as President Ronald Reagan battled a recession.

Fatalities fell by more than 14 percent in New England, even though Massachusetts had the lowest seat belt use rate (66.8 percent), and in New Hampshire, which has no seat belt law for adults, use was under 70 percent. Fatalities fell by 10 percent or more in many states along the Atlantic seaboard, parts of the Upper Midwest and the West Coast.