The New York Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee has released its annual report on the status of the state’s highway safety. This report is critical for those who attempt to understand why high rates of motor vehicle accidents occur on the state’s highways and for those who work on solutions to improve these rates.
The report also details numerous accomplishments attained by the state’s highway safety program over the past year. While it may seem self-congratulatory to release a report detailing an administration’s accomplishments, understanding these milestones is key to ensuring that safety initiatives are truly achieving their intended aims.
The report was clearly compiled before 2013 traffic data was fully analyzed and released. As a result, this 2013 safety report does not analyze finalized data from 2013. Instead, the report makes numerous comparisons between the state of highway safety during the past several years and then discusses which trends seem to be holding steady and which trends seem to be improving or reverting according to available 2013 data.
The report is extensive and is therefore too lengthy and detailed to discuss in a single blog post. However, interested New Yorkers should feel free to access the report via the link provided below. Reading the report will likely give you a very solid sense of why New York highways are currently fairly hazardous. It will also give you a good frame of reference for what the current administration is doing to address and ultimately minimize hazards currently plaguing New York’s highway travelers.
Source: New York State Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee, “2013 Highway Safety Annual Report”