Automotive safety is the study and practice of automotive design, construction, equipment and regulation to minimize the occurrence and consequences of traffic collisions involving motor vehicles. Road traffic safety more broadly includes roadway design.
Road traffic safety refers to the methods and measures, such as traffic calming, to prevent road users from being killed or seriously injured. Typical road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, passengers of vehicles, and passengers of on-road public transport, mainly buses and trams.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is an agency of the U.S. federal government, part of the Department of Transportation, focused on automobile safety regulations.
The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was enacted in the United States in 1966 to empower the federal government to set and administer new safety standards for motor vehicles and road traffic safety. The Act was the first mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles. The Act created the National Highway Safety Bureau. The Act was one of a number of initiatives by the government in response to increasing number of cars and associated fatalities and injuries on the road following a period when the number of people killed on the road had increased 6-fold and the number of vehicles was up 11-fold since 1925. The reduction of the rate of death attributable to motor-vehicle crashes in the United States represents the successful public health response to a great technologic advance of the 20th century—the motorization of the United States.
Fatalities that result from motor vehicle crashes are the second largest cause of accidental deaths in the United States.
This is a list of numbers of motorcycle deaths in U.S. by year from 1994 to 2014. United States motorcycle fatalities increased every year for 11 years after reaching a historic low of 2,116 fatalities in 1997, then increased to over 5,000 around 2008 and then plateaued in the 4 to 5 thousands range in the 2010s. In nine years motorcycle deaths more than doubled from the late 1990s to 2008. Despite providing less than 1% of miles driven, they made up 15% of traffic deaths in 2012.
Transportation safety in the United States encompasses safety of transportation in the United States, including automobile crashes, airplane crashes, rail crashes, and other mass transit incidents, although the most fatalities are generated by road incidents annually killing 32,479 people in 2011 to over 42,000 people in 2022. The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles: 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane. For a person who drives a million miles in a lifetime this amounts to a 1.5% chance of death.
Aggressive driving is defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as the behaviour of an individual who "commits a combination of moving traffic offences so as to endanger other persons or property."
86 percent of people in the United States use private automobiles as their primary form of transportation to their workplace.
Road traffic collisions generally fall into one of five common types:
A traffic collision, also known as a motor vehicle collision, or car crash, occurs when a vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other moving or stationary obstruction, such as a tree, pole or building. Traffic collisions often result in injury, disability, death, and property damage as well as financial costs to both society and the individuals involved. Road transport is statistically the most dangerous situation people deal with on a daily basis, but casualty figures from such incidents attract less media attention than other, less frequent types of tragedy. The commonly used term car accident is increasingly falling out of favor with many government departments and organizations, with the Associated Press style guide recommending caution before using the term and the National Union of Journalists advising against it in their Road Collision Reporting Guidelines. Some collisions are intentional vehicle-ramming attacks, staged crashes, vehicular homicide or vehicular suicide.
Worldwide, it was estimated that 1.25 million people were killed and many millions more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2013. This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among young adults of 15–29 years of age and the ninth most frequent cause of death for all ages worldwide. In the United States, 40,100 people died and 2.8 million were injured in crashes in 2017, and around 2,000 children under 16 years old die every year.
Distracted driving is the act of driving while engaging in other activities which distract the driver's attention away from the road. Distractions are shown to compromise the safety of the driver, passengers, pedestrians, and people in other vehicles.
National Teen Driver Safety Week (NTDSW) is conducted annually during the third week of October in the United States. It was established by Congress in 2007.
Alcohol-related traffic crashes are defined by the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as alcohol-related if either a driver or a non-motorist had a measurable or estimated BAC of 0.01 g/dl or above.
Various laws in the United States regulate the use of mobile phones and other electronics by motorists. Different states take different approaches. Some laws affect only novice drivers or commercial drivers, while some laws affect all drivers. Some laws target handheld devices only, while other laws affect both handheld and handsfree devices.
People who are driving as part of their work duties are an important road user category. First, workers themselves are at risk of road traffic injury. Contributing factors include fatigue and long work hours, delivery pressures, distractions from mobile phones and other devices, lack of training to operate the assigned vehicle, vehicle defects, use of prescription and non-prescription medications, medical conditions, and poor journey planning. Death, disability, or injury of a family wage earner due to road traffic injury, in addition to causing emotional pain and suffering, creates economic hardship for the injured worker and family members that may persist well beyond the event itself.
List of cyclist or cycling deaths in U.S. by year
Tesla Autopilot is an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) developed by Tesla that amounts to partial vehicle automation. Tesla provides "Base Autopilot" on all vehicles, which includes Autosteer, and traffic-aware cruise control. Owners may purchase or subscribe to Full Self-Driving (FSD) which adds semi-autonomous navigation that responds to traffic lights and stop signs, lane change assistance, self-parking, and the ability to summon the car from a garage or parking spot.
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