Reducing the risk of deaths and injuries from traffic crashes and other mishaps means planning our built environment with an acceptance that people make mistakes.
Bloomberg By Jessie Singer March 21, 2022 New data offers a novel lesson on a largely unseen crisis: the rise of “accidental” deaths and injuries, a broad category that includes falls, drownings, poisonings, fires and more. Basically, “accidental” covers the ways people die by injury, outside of violence or disease, and it’s skyrocketing as a cause of death in the U.S. Accidents killed some 173,000 people in 2019. By 2020, the accidental death toll jumped to more than 200,000. These disparate dangers have a lot in common, starting with what can be done to address the crisis. One unlikely example comes from Utah: In 2017, then-Governor Gary Herbert lowered the legal drinking limit for licensed drivers from 0.08 blood-alcohol concentration to 0.05. The change made Utah the state with the lowest blood-alcohol content limit in the U.S.
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