Deaths on KY roads dipped as people stayed home. Will they rebound with reopenings?
As Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear shut down businesses and public activities in March due to the spread of COVID-19, highways in the Bluegrass State became safer.
Kentucky highway fatalities this year are the lowest they have been at this date in five years. Through Wednesday, Kentucky State Police reported 258 highway fatalities so far this year. For the same time period in 2019, there were 306 fatalities, compared to 289 in 2018, 316 in 2017 and 330 in 2016.
But records from Kentucky State Police and Kentucky Office of Highway Safety show that as Kentuckians try to get back to some semblance of normalcy, more people are back on the road and that likely will mean an uptick in fatalities.
In the last three months, as the coronavirus has raged, 157 were killed on Kentucky roads. That compares to 185 for the same three months in 2019 — a decrease of 28, or 15 percent.
Chuck Wolfe, a spokesman for the state Transportation Cabinet, said there is an “obvious correspondence” between highway fatalities and Beshear’s implementation of a number of actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by encouraging people to stay healthy at home.
The decline in deaths, though, did not keep pace with the decline in traffic. Weekly traffic counts in Kentucky have declined by a range of 18 to 41 percent during the economic shutdown.
The cabinet keeps tabs on weekly traffic counts in the state for its planning engineers. It has 96 “continuous count stations” around the state that are monitored 24 hours a day by modem. Data from them are downloaded weekly.
Wolfe said there also are several thousand other counters, both temporary and embedded, that are monitored much less frequently but can help calibrate traffic counts.
The counts for this year compared to the same period last year vividly show less traffic on Kentucky roads during COVID-19, but the pace is increasing as Kentucky reopens.
“Similar to nationwide trends, traffic volumes decreased as Kentuckians followed state and national guidance by telecommuting, avoiding crowds and limiting trips to essential travel,” said Wolfe. “The first recorded traffic count drop we saw began the week of March 8 and traffic counts have been lower each week since when compared with the counts from the corresponding weeks in 2019.”
On Sunday, Feb. 16, which started the eighth calendar week of this year, the state count for cars and pickups on Kentucky roads was 2,538,587. That count was up 5 percent from the same time period in 2019.
And then came the state of emergency.
Two days later, on March 8, the date that began the weekly traffic count for the state, the number of cars and trucks on the road dropped 3 percent from what it had been that week in 2019.
In the following week that began March 15, the drop was 23 percent. The next week saw a 38 percent decrease. It was down 39 percent the following week and reached 42 percent less the week of April 5.
That marked the biggest weekly decrease this year when compared to weeks in 2019.
For the next two weeks, many Kentuckians still traveled little. Of April 12 and April 19, the percentage decreases were 41 and 40, respectively, compared to those weeks in 2019.
On April 21, Beshear announced the launch of “Healthy at Work,” an initiative to help Kentucky businesses reopen safely. On Monday, April 27, the state began the gradual restart and reopening of some health care services and facilities.
In the week starting Sunday, April 26, the traffic declined 33 percent in Kentucky between 2019 and 2020.
More businesses reopened May 11 and Kentucky’s highways got busier. The traffic volume count was down only 26 percent the week of May 17.
Then restaurants, with limited capacity, reopened May 22.
On the week of May 24, the last week for which counts are available, the count for cars and trucks was down 18 percent compared to the same week of 2019.
Lori Weaver Hawkins, public and government affairs manager for AAA Blue Grass in Lexington, said highway deaths didn’t fall as fast as vehicle traffic.
“Between March 15 and April 15, Kentucky saw a 23.7 percent decline [in highway deaths] compared with the five-year average during that time period, but that’s only 5 to 7 percent less than where we started in 2020,” she said.
“That’s not significantly less despite considering how many fewer cars are on the road,” she said.
This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Deaths on KY roads dipped as people stayed home. Will they rebound with reopenings?."
