Traffic is lighter these days, but it is too early to tell if this has become safer for Texan drivers as millions work from home or are laid off.
One thing hasn’t changed: Texas continues its year-long streak with at least one fatal accident every day on a public road.
Texas Department of Transportation engineers observed the decline in traffic for most of March and compared the amounts recorded at permanent stations across the state to the amounts recorded the last week of February.
When home stay orders were rolled out across the country, traffic in the last week of March decreased 41% compared to the last week of February.
Urban traffic continued to decline, with Austin falling the most at 49%. Traffic decreased 42% in Fort Worth and 37% in Dallas.
Some consumer advocates noticed the drop in traffic and urged motorists to take a break from their insurance companies. California’s state insurance commissioner ordered consumer relief there, but the order came after several major insurers announced loans and refunds last week – most in the 15-25% range.
According to the law, insurance companies can’t hold onto piles of cash, but premium adjustments aren’t calculated after just a few weeks, experts say. Instead, company announcements may be driven by both a perceived public relations issue and some peer pressure.
Nat Pope, insurance expert and economics professor at the University of North Texas, says the refunds and credits are atypical for the industry, even if the intuition involved seems reasonable.
“The fact that they are doing this 1) without being forced by the government, 2) making flat-rate reimbursements without investigation, and 3) doing so before the end of the insurance period is all a bit strange,” Pope wrote in an e- Mail .
Accident data collected by the Texas Department of Transportation suggests a drop in crash rates, but Texas peace officials will make their reports as soon as their investigations are complete. In other words, there is no deadline for submitting the crash data. So far, officials have recorded 241 road deaths in March 2020, compared to 305 in March 2019.
Nationwide, peace officials reported around 48,000 accidents per month from March to December last year. From January to early April, the rate was around 41,000 per month.
In Denton County, peace officials reported about 1,000 accidents per month from March to December 2019. From January to early April, they reported around 900 accidents per month.
However, the number of fatal accidents in Denton County has hardly changed: 37 of the accidents between March and December were fatal; 10 of the crashes from January to early April were fatal.
Denton police are still tracking their activities and are still unsure if there have been fewer accidents, said department spokeswoman Allison Beckwith.
“We saw a slowdown, especially in the evening and night hours,” said Beckwith.
However, officers have seen some extreme speeds – drivers traveling over 100 mph – on the freeways and have ticketed those motorists.
“We’ll enforce that,” said Beckwith. “We don’t allow them to endanger others.”
Robert Wunderlich, director of the center for traffic safety at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, said traffic data and especially crash data are not comparable to the stock market.
“It’s hard to study it in real time,” said Wunderlich.
For example, someone might survive the crash but die from their injuries a month later, which changes the data.
He was part of a research team that studied the impact of the Great Recession on traffic data and found a decrease in major accidents and fatalities during that time.
The current crisis is different and brings many commuters off the road who are not necessarily the riskiest drivers, he said.
“The more risk averse you are, the less likely you are to travel right now,” said Wunderlich.
For those trying to make driving safer, this unusual window may offer additional insight into the psychology of risky driving.
“I hope it gives us an insight,” said Wunderlich. “This is a tough nut to crack.”
PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881 and on Twitter at @phwolfeDRC.
