By Leslie Vasquez
Human behavior is one of the biggest wildcards in preventing traffic deaths and serious injuries. That is why many transportation professionals now focus on designing systems that stay safe even when people inevitably make mistakes. Alcohol impaired driving is once again on the rise in the United States, and decades of awareness, education, and enforcement have not solved this problem. New research shows that alcohol is involved in nearly one-third of all traffic deaths, even as public concern about the issue remains very high. In other words, people know drunk driving is dangerous, but some do it anyway. This is not about excusing impaired driving but about acknowledging reality and designing transportation systems that reduce harm when risky behavior persists.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how fragile our current system is. Alcohol related traffic deaths were stable for over a decade, at around 10,400 per year before 2020. During the pandemic, they spiked sharply to about 13,500 deaths by 2022. This pattern is found in other research as well, showing that major social and economic disruptions, like mass layoffs, are often followed by increases in traffic crashes and deaths. When people’s lives are destabilized, risky behavior increases. A safety system that relies on good judgment is not resilient in moments of real-world stress.
The latest report also reveals that impaired driving risk is not evenly distributed across the population. It is highly concentrated among repeat traffic violators, men, young drivers, and people who have already been injured in a crash. This concentration of repeated behavior demonstrates the very limits of awareness-based campaigns. And in a system dominated by larger, heavier, and faster cars, this behavior is more dangerous than ever before.
Humans make mistakes, and personal responsibility alone will never be a sufficient safety strategy. Roads that only work if everyone is alert, sober, and rational, are designed for a world that does not exist. Designing with impaired drivers in mind is not about alcohol, it’s about designing for human error. The same infrastructure that protects others from drunk drivers also protects from those who are tired, distracted, stressed, or simply misjudge a situation. We have written before about how road design and built environment, such as lowering speed limits, can protect against distracted driving.
This shift toward designing for human error is increasingly reflected in how transportation leaders are thinking about safety at the system level. Roger Millar, former head of Washington DOT, led a significant change by redefining Washington’s Vision Zero framework to treat land use as a core pillar of traffic safety, not just driver behavior. Meanwhile, Garrett Eucalitto, commissioner of Connecticut’s DOT and recent president of AASHTO, has made “centering safety” and “safer users” central to his national agenda, emphasizing infrastructure treatments, speed management, advanced technology, and better data collection as more effective methods of changing driver behavior. Together, these examples point to a growing consensus: reducing traffic deaths requires not just influencing how people behave but redesigning the environments that shapes risk in the first place.
Photo credit: Gordon Chaffin via Unsplash. License.