(The Center Square) — Rural America has 20% of the country’s population and 46% of the nation’s car crashes. A lack of resources, both in cash and workers, poses a challenge to avoiding wrecks and deaths.
Though rural traffic studies have been of questionable quality, a new report from the Governors Highway Safety Association suggests broader cooperation to pool local resources, more public outreach, and better road design to curb collisions.
“Rural roads have been especially lethal in recent years. Between 2016 and 2020, the five most recent years of data, 85,002 people have died in crashes on rural roads,” a GHSA press release says. “That’s more than the entire population of Scranton … In 2020, the risk of dying in a crash was 62% higher on a rural road compared to an urban road for the same trip length. While rural road deaths fell for several years before the pandemic, they increased in 2020, mirroring what happened across the country.”
Rural areas tend to have fewer drivers wearing seat belts, which drives up the crash fatality rate, the report says. Speeding and distracted driving, too, are common problems. The problem isn’t entirely on drivers, however. Aging and outdated road design poses problems for rural drivers. New innovations can take years to trickle out to roads that need improvement.
“Inconsistent design or lack of design, which is found on a great many rural roads, can be deadly,” the report says.
Fixing bad roads in rural areas isn’t as simple as in suburban or urban areas.
“Unlike their urban counterparts, crash locations in rural areas are not typically in hot spot locations,” the report says. “Rural crash locations tend to be random, which makes their identification and elimination more difficult.”
The trouble in rural Pennsylvania is reflective of drivers statewide. After increasing for years, traffic deaths in Pennsylvania declined slightly last year, as The Center Square previously reported. However, distracted driving has increased since the pandemic, which is a common cause of collisions.
The commonwealth is following a national trend in reevaluating its road approach. Pennsylvania must submit a plan to the federal government in November that will detail how it will protect vulnerable road users, with an eye toward accounting for human error and lowering dangerous speeds.
The GHSA study used Pennsylvania’s Cameron County as an example, thanks to its 23% decline in car crashes in the 2010s. However, the reduction may be due to population loss rather than changes in driving behavior or enforcement.
The Pennsylvania State Police’s high-visibility enforcement of traffic laws in the county on high-trafficked roads could also play a factor in improving driver behavior, the report says.
While the report recommended road improvements such as rumble strips and lower speed limits, the studies cited for them didn’t inspire confidence.
“Overall, the designs used in these studies were weak,” the report says. “Randomization was used in very few studies, and comparison groups were often not used at all.”
As PennDOT and local leaders look to improve road safety, rural parts of the commonwealth might not know what works without trial and error, even after they follow the lead of federal leaders.
