As the nation continues to emerge from COVID, new studies continue to reveal just how much COVID impacted daily life.
AAA is examining how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted driving habits at the height of the pandemic.
“We examined how the COVID 19 pandemic and associated restrictions such as the stay at home order, led to a drastic reduction in U S road travel.”
That’s Adrienne Woodland, the spokesperson for AAA in Michigan. She says research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s New American Driving Survey (2020) shows: The average number of trips for all modes of transportation dropped by 40% in April 2020. On top of that, personal car trips plunged 45%.
“This data demonstrates what a profound impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on our commute habits and patterns in the United States,”
Daily trips for all modes of transportation fell from an average of 3.7 trips per day in 2019 to 2.2 trips in April 2020, before slightly recovering. Woodland says it also heavily impacted transit, taxi and rideshare options.
“The proportion of people who reported making any trips by transit, taxi, or rideshare plummeted from 5.5% pre-pandemic to 1.7% in April of 2020, before leveling off at approximately 2.4% for the remainder of the year.”
However, an alarming part of the study shows that despite fewer cars being on the road and more people staying home, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently estimated that more than 38-thousand people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2020 — the largest projected number of fatalities since 2007. It is an increase of about 7.2 percent over 2019.
“As the U.S. climbs out of the COVID-19 pandemic, highway safety officials will need to double down on curbing speeding, substance-impaired driving, and failure to buckle up.”
Woodland says you can find more info at AAA.com
