American Driving in 2021: Reckless and Wreckful. By Steve Sailer.
Evidence continues to pile up that the twin historic disasters of 2020 — the dreaded Covid pandemic and the celebrated racial reckoning — have left Americans crazier and lazier. …
My tabulation of year-end homicide counts from 44 of the 50 biggest cities found that killings were up 45 percent in 2021 versus 2019. This week, I find from a sample of 30 states and selected cities that have already reported year-end traffic fatalities that car crash deaths grew 17 percent from 2019 to 2021. Those are both unusually huge two-year increases. …
When everything shut down in the spring of 2020, some drivers took advantage of the empty streets and the suddenly reclusive police to drive like bats out of hell. For example, despite no doubt wanting to socially distance in 2020, the Utah Highway Patrol wound up issuing 31 percent more tickets than in 2019 to drivers speeding over 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour) …
Despite the worse driving, American cops prudently ticketed drivers less. …
Not only did drivers get crazier, they also got lazier, often not bothering to buckle their seat belt: Deaths with an unbuckled seat belt were up 15 percent. …
It was widely assumed that legalizing marijuana would cut down on drunk driving, but instead Americans seem to be driving more both drunk and high. KIRO notes:
In Washington state, about 60% of the fatal crashes in 2020 involved impaired drivers. [Washington State Police] says an increasing number of DUI crashes are involving multiple substances, alcohol and marijuana in particular. …
Racial differences:
Upon hearing the news of George Floyd’s death in late May 2020, the Establishment decided that America’s most pressing problem was too much law and order. …
In the past seven months of 2020, blacks died in wrecks 36 percent more often than in the same period in 2019. For the rest of the population, the increase was 9 percent.
Why did blacks get themselves into so many bloodbaths, both with guns and with cars, as soon as the nation’s cops figured out in June 2020 that elites were itching to turn them into the Face of White Supremacy over some Traffic Stop Gone Wrong?
It’s almost as if when police retreat to the doughnut shop, blacks, like most humans, tend to behave worse. …
Fortunately, blacks aren’t on average as disastrous with cars as they are with guns. While they accounted for 56.5 percent of known murder offenders in 2020 FBI statistics, they comprised 19.7 percent of traffic deaths in 2020 NHTSA numbers. …
Still, on a national level, murders and car crashes tend to go up and down together. For example, after both murders and auto accidents declined during the Great Recession, during the first Black Lives Matter era following Ferguson in 2014, murders went up by 2016 by 23 percent and highway mortality by 15 percent. Then both measures fell during the early Trump years before shooting up again over the past two years.
It’s not a coincidence that there has been a Ferguson Effect and now a Floyd Effect on both murders and lethal wrecks: The root causes of both include depressed police and exultant lawbreakers. …
Contrast with Japan:
The Japanese publish their national year-end number on the fourth day of the new year, while the U.S. usually takes about three months. Unsurprisingly, in well-informed Japan, mortal crashes tend to go down about 7 percent per year. …
The Japanese have set a challenging but reasonable goal of cutting fatal mishaps from 16,765 in 1970 to below 2,000 by 2025. They appear to be on track, with deaths in 2021 falling by 203 to 2,636.
Japan, though, is a serious country while the United States is becoming ever more the land of wishful thinking and make-believe.
