By Mary Marvin, Mayor of Bronxville

Feb. 2, 2022: So many of you have remarked to me that drivers in the Village and frankly all roads nearby are populated by a different type of motorist - angrier, more aggressive, more impatient. Based on Village police interactions with drivers, our Chief would more than echo this sentiment.

I also noticed the shift as a pedestrian as one seems now to take their life in their hands at marked crosswalks without mechanized signals.

Your comments to me and anecdotal evidence prompted me to do a little research to see if current motorists are of a different breed.

After doing some homework, I have learned that many scientists who have studied this behavior in the past year and a half attribute a good bit of it to the pandemic.

In 2020, despite millions of workers staying home and traffic plummeting, there were an estimated 39,000 auto related deaths in the United States, representing a 7% increase from 2019. As traffic started to normalize last year, roadway deaths jumped 18%, marking the biggest six-month increase since the federal government began tracking fatal crashes in 1979.

At the very local level, I am sure you read about the motorist in Yonkers who drove into an oncoming sedan at such a high speed that the collision split the other vehicle in half killing four recent Yonkers high school graduates. Scientists believe that accidents like this are happening because as highways and roads became emptier because of Covid, it became easier for drivers to accelerate to unprecedented speeds.

In other areas of driving, to excuse the pun, we have also gone in reverse as it has been documented that fewer drivers are buckling their seatbelts, more are driving while using their phones and as alcohol sales and drug overdoses have soared during the pandemic, so have DUI’s.

Among accidents resulting in death from serious injuries, the proportion of drivers who tested positive for opiates has nearly doubled since 2020 in tandem with marijuana use increasing substantially. But many would argue that sober drivers are also acting like they’re racing in the Indy 500.

After doing targeted research, I learned there is an unprecedented consensus that this driving behavior is an under discussed impact of life during Covid as it is a manifestation of aggressive and antisocial behavior. It represents as symptoms of widespread feelings of isolation, depression, resentment and despair. Driving has also served as an outlet for rebellion and boredom after being so cooped up for many months.

Though this driving behavior is well documented, scientists note the amazing spike in air rage incidents and assaults on healthcare workers and waiters. Combine this with supply chain shortages, extreme weather disasters and unprecedented political and social divisions and we have sadly a perfect storm for stressed behavior. Marissa Iati in the New York Times calls it, “collective trauma.”

No quarter of the United States has been spared this phenomenon as rural areas continue to suffer a disproportionate number of crashes and the plague has certainly hit New York City. The City introduced reforms in 2014 aimed at eliminating traffic deaths within a decade. Unfortunately, traffic related deaths actually shot up in the city in 2020, well beyond the numbers of 2014.

As is reported so often in the city based papers, pedestrian deaths have counted for much of the spike in these car related fatalities. In fairness, the upward trend actually began before the pandemic with roughly 600 pedestrians killed in 2019, more than a 50% increase from a decade earlier. Of the pedestrian fatalities, speed is the determinative with fast driving on local roads the major factor especially in areas that have speed limits above 30 mph. Compounding the issue is the proliferation of larger, heavier vehicles like SUVs on the road which inflict more grievous injuries.

So how do we change direction?

Scientists all agree that the solution is quite simple – get drivers to slow down.

However, it seems to be a particularly difficult problem for American drivers as our road system itself has actually been engineered to maximize speed and when in doubt, designers always cut the size of the sidewalk in favor of more traffic lanes. There just doesn’t seem to be a huge appetite to tackle this issue. In fact, Virginia recently raised the threshold for reckless driving from 80 to 85 mph and more than 20 states recently had traffic safety legislation die in committee because legislators feared a political backlash from the voting motorist. As a result, the US suffers twice as many traffic related deaths per capita than any other developed country.

Belgium, Spain, France, and the Czech Republic had rates comparable to the US in 2000 but have since cut them in half. The Netherland’s car fatality rate, once higher than even ours, is now one-third of the US total as a result of a campaign of street narrowing and the addition of curves to force drivers to slow down. They also adopted a fairly new practice called a “continuous sidewalk” which extends a sidewalk straight through intersections, giving pedestrians the clear right of way.

Net net, every researcher felt it was time to elevate people’s lives over motorists’ freedom.

Photo by N. Bower