Friday, December 12, 2008

"Auto deaths down 10 percent so far this year"

From today's story in the online version of the Boston Globe:
"Federal safety officials say auto fatalities dropped almost 10 percent in 2008 through October. If the trend holds up for the last two months of the year, highway deaths could reach their lowest level since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

While this is good news for this year, it is not a trend I would expect to continue. Since I don't think that the American auto fleet somehow got extremely safer in the matter of a few months, I'm guessing that the drop in auto deaths is most likely highly correlated to the fact that high gas prices led to a precipitous fall in miles driven over the earlier part of the year (along with people going easier on the accelerator to save gas). It will be interesting to see what happens now that average gas prices are back near the price from 4 years ago.