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In December 2012, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a research note providing statistics and analyses of motor vehicle crashes that took place in the U.S. in 2011. The research note includes statistics on numerous categories, such as fatality rates, injury rates, and crash type for vehicular accidents that occurred in 2011, the most recent year for which this type of data is available.
The NHTSA reports that in 2011 the number of fatalities from motor vehicle crashes in the United States (32,367) reached the lowest number since 1949. Furthermore, this number was 1.9% less than the number of fatalities from motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2010 (32,999). In further positive news, the report notes that the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2011 decreased to a significant low of 1.10.
Although the fatality rate in motor vehicle accidents decreased in 2011, the overall injury rate in motor vehicle accidents increased slightly for the same year. According to the research note, there was an increase of 1.3% in the overall injury rate in the U.S. in motor vehicle accidents.
The report did provide some negative statistics from 2011, particularly regarding large truck crashes. There was an overall increase of 1.9% in the number of fatalities resulting from crashes involving large trucks. When separated by category (single-vehicle truck occupant, multivehicle truck occupant), there was an increase of as high as 21% in the number of large truck fatalities between 2010 and 2011.
In further negative news, there was an increase in distracted-driving crashes from 2010 (3,267 fatalities) to 2011 (3,331 fatalities) of 1.9 percent. There was also an increase in motorcyclist fatalities (increase by 94 fatalities) between 2010 and 2011.
See the full NHTSA article at:
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811701.pdf
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