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Highway Fatalities at High Levels Entering Summer

From January to the end of May, deaths increase by 17 over 2015

By Molly Priddy
Traffic moves along U.S. Highway 2 at the intersection of Reserve Drive past two white markers placed by the American Legion.

Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, marking the unofficial beginning of the summer season in Northwest Montana.

As the weather warms and dries, so do the state’s highways and various road systems, ushering in what has proven to be a historically deadly time for drivers.

Fatalities on Montana’s roadways so far this year have already far surpassed the level for the same time period last year. As of May 31, there had been 67 roadway fatalities, compared to 50 in 2015. There were 224 road fatalities in all of 2015, up from 192 in 2014.

The state Department of Transportation has launched its Vision Zero program, seeking to keep roads safe and drivers invested in winnowing down the fatalities to nothing. But MDOT Director Mike Tooley said the latest uptick in deaths is due not to a new threat on the roads, but rather to some familiar, banal factors.

“It’s the same three factors that are the top killers every year,” Tooley said in an interview last week. “It’s roadway departure, it’s unrestrained occupants, and it’s impaired driving.”

Speed is No. 6 on the list of reasons people die on Montana roadways, Tooley noted, though it’s an important piece of the puzzle.

“It’s on the list of course,” he said. “If you reduce the speed when you have a crash, the chances of being injured go down.”

When the death toll rises like this, Tooley said he and his staff look into potential reasons other than the top three. They’re exploring how the 2015 Legislature’s decision to increase the interstate speed limit from 75 mph to 80 mph may be affecting driver safety, and while it’s still too early to determine the true effects of the increase – it only took affect in October 2015 – it doesn’t seem to be playing a major role just yet.

In the time since the increase, Tooley said, there have been 20 people killed on the interstate. From October through May in 2009, 56 people died on the interstate, Tooley said.

Tooley has asked his staff to research the affect this increase might have on the connecting primary and secondary road systems, a sort of halo effect that might reveal itself in future data.

For now, the most deaths have been on the primary and rural roads, Tooley said, largely because two-lane highways make up the bulk of the state’s roadways.

Capt. Art Collins with the Montana Highway Patrol said there’s a wide range of factors that come into play when considering increased fatalities, such as the price of gas corresponding with an increase of people on the road or a dry winter meaning faster speeds in colder months.

But for a majority of the fatal crashes already recorded this year – which Collins has mapped out in a spreadsheet – the reasons are evergreen.

“It is the same old story over and over again,” Collins said. “A majority of these are single-vehicle crashes where somebody drifted off the roadway left to right, overcorrected, and rolled the vehicle.”

The deceased occupants were usually not wearing a seat belt, Collins noted.

Other factors, such as distracted driving, can also play a role. But for Tooley, the root of this problem might be simpler.

“My sense of the overall is people don’t take driving as a very serious activity when in fact it is,” Tooley said. “The longer we go without an incident, the more likely we are to treat it like, ‘I’ve made this trip 10,000 times, it’ll be fine.’ But your risk starts over every time you turn the key.”