Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I haven't traveled it lately, maybe Sunsprit can enlighten me, but the highway from Muddy Gap over to Rawlins had several fatalities over a short period of time. As such they put in a "HEADLIGHTS REQUIRED 24/7" stretch of road. I never heard of any results and I have not been over that road in years, so I don't know if they have changed lane markings, shoulders, highway markers, signs, etc...
Have traveled this stretch of road 10 times in the last several months; the signage is there advising headlight use ... but I didn't travel this road before the signage was posted. So I don't know if they've changed any of the other stuff about the road.
They do post signs advising when the next passing lane will be ahead, so that's a help for some of the impatient.
I've been traveling this with my RV, so 65 mph is my top highway speed and I've had very few vehicles to pass there. I've been passed a few times by fellows with pick-up trucks towing trailers where I felt that the gap in oncoming traffic was minimal ... so I've slowed down and allowed them to pass a little quicker. Didn't adversely affect my travels and I'd rather err on the side of caution then otherwise; life's too short when you're traveling 800-1000 miles per week to get aggravated over some of the discourteous on the road.
I appreciate your experiences and understand your point of view. Really, I do. I've been on accident scenes lately where we couldn't identify the brand of car but everybody walked away. Hard to comprehend - didn't used to see that. Better engineering is saving lives. We like that.
However, I know from many, many years of experience both as a trauma practitioner, researcher and teacher that velocity is the most variable factor in the trauma equation because it is squared. Simple fact is, you can't tear an aortic branch at 20 mph, but you sure as heck will at 70 mph. And an aortic branch tear is ALWAYS fatal. Think of it this way - accidental back-over events aside, how many people die in traffic accidents when the closure rate is 30 mph versus how many die when the closure rate is between 75 (think: car versus bridge abutment) and 150? (read: head-on collision.)
Your post also made me think - if better engineering is saving more lives, why is the fatality rate still so abnormally high here? I agree again that time to surgery is very, very important, and the per capita statistical skewing that occurs because Wyoming has a smaller population than just about everyone else also impacts the stats. But the studies are really conclusive: when we are talking about lethality in accidents, speed controls. It just does.
I have no basis to question your medical experience ....
but your physics lesson is contrary to what I've experienced in the field. Again, few accidents are xxx's miles per hour to zero in a millisecond situation, there's a time period where crush zone construction and safety devices have time to do their protective work.
I suspect that you have little practical experience with the remoteness of Wyoming roads and travel. As well, there are very few trauma facilities in the entire state serving a wide geographic territory, and only a couple at the top tier level (is that Level 3?). Many communities around the state have minimal medical facilities, and of those there's a lot that don't have full time staffing available for serious medical trauma emergencies. There are literally places where there is no on-call capability because there isn't enough medical action there to justify the expense of paying staff to be around, even part-time. Many communities have no medical facilities at all. Add in the distance/time that it takes for a round-trip med evac, and these are the prevailing factors.
Please realize that a med evac isn't going to be requested a lot of times until primary responders have made it to a accident scene and can make the determination that it's required, which can add substantial time to any medical emergency out here. An additional complication is the adverse weather conditions which present for many of the road incidents here which preclude the use of helicopters or even med evac aircraft once a patient is taken to an appropriate airstrip. The remoteness of Wyoming is aggravated by so much of the state ... approx 50% ... being public lands that are essentially undeveloped areas.
The distances between major towns in much of this state is larger than what it takes to traverse many states in the USA. You have but to look at a map of Wyoming to see the distances between towns, it's not dense and close together like it is in so much of the USA where even rural communities are separated by only a few miles and it's farmland between them with a lot of farms. "fly over country" does apply here; I've flown recently to Buffalo and Sheridan (typically, at 1,800' to 2,000' AGL) from my SE Wyoming location and it was quite some time between flying over any development whatsoever; a landmark for me in that trip is Guernsey with Wheatland off in the distance, otherwise, nothing. I don't even see Cheyenne in that trip. Similarly, I flew to Valentine NE a few weeks ago and there was nothing ... no communities whatsoever ... that I flew over in a direct line from my airstrip to Valentine. There were isolated ranches where you could spot the miles of desolate road that were used to access the ranch once somebody left the isolated county road, many times unpaved and simply a graded roadway hardpacked.
I'd mention that I am a close friend of a prominent neurosurgeon and an internal medicine doc, for decades, who've been doing their time in the emergency room and follow up surgeries. They've told me that an aortic branch tear can occur at speeds as slow as 20 mph, if the blow is delivered from the side. My medical knowledge is rudimentary, but the gist of what they tell me is that the heart swings like a pendulum in that situation as opposed to a frontal blow. We were discussing this following a fatal bicycle collision where one bicyclist t-boned another during an off-road race and the result was fatal. They mentioned this was how another good friend of ours, an internal medicine MD, died when he hit a tree while skiing backwards on a modest slope while watching his friends coming down an intermediate hill. At the scene of the accident, it was presumed that he'd sustained a head injury, but the autopsy revealed the aortic tear. According to the witnesses, he was skiing slowly backward when the snowpack near and underneath a tree on the edge of the slope dropped out from under him and he fell. I doubt he was skiing more than 5 mph, I'd watched him do this on other ski trips and he was a master of skiing on ahead faster so he could ski backwards to watch the rest of us and offer his tips on our skiing skills.
I appreciate your experiences and understand your point of view. Really, I do. I've been on accident scenes lately where we couldn't identify the brand of car but everybody walked away. Hard to comprehend - didn't used to see that. Better engineering is saving lives. We like that.
However, I know from many, many years of experience both as a trauma practitioner, researcher and teacher that velocity is the most variable factor in the trauma equation because it is squared. Simple fact is, you can't tear an aortic branch at 20 mph, but you sure as heck will at 70 mph. And an aortic branch tear is ALWAYS fatal. Think of it this way - accidental back-over events aside, how many people die in traffic accidents when the closure rate is 30 mph versus how many die when the closure rate is between 75 (think: car versus bridge abutment) and 150? (read: head-on collision.)
Your post also made me think - if better engineering is saving more lives, why is the fatality rate still so abnormally high here? I agree again that time to surgery is very, very important, and the per capita statistical skewing that occurs because Wyoming has a smaller population than just about everyone else also impacts the stats. But the studies are really conclusive: when we are talking about lethality in accidents, speed controls. It just does.
I have no basis to question your medical experience ....
but your physics lesson is contrary to what I've experienced in the field. Again, few accidents are xxx's miles per hour to zero in a millisecond situation, there's a time period where crush zone construction and safety devices have time to do their protective work.
I suspect that you have little practical experience with the remoteness of Wyoming roads and travel. As well, there are very few trauma facilities in the entire state serving a wide geographic territory, and only a couple at the top tier level (is that Level 3?). Many communities around the state have minimal medical facilities, and of those there's a lot that don't have full time staffing available for serious medical trauma emergencies. There are literally places where there is no on-call capability because there isn't enough medical action there to justify the expense of paying staff to be around, even part-time. Many communities have no medical facilities at all. Add in the distance/time that it takes for a round-trip med evac, and these are the prevailing factors.
Please realize that a med evac isn't going to be requested a lot of times until primary responders have made it to a accident scene and can make the determination that it's required, which can add substantial time to any medical emergency out here. An additional complication is the adverse weather conditions which present for many of the road incidents here which preclude the use of helicopters or even med evac aircraft once a patient is taken to an appropriate airstrip. The remoteness of Wyoming is aggravated by so much of the state ... approx 50% ... being public lands that are essentially undeveloped areas.
The distances between major towns in much of this state is larger than what it takes to traverse many states in the USA. You have but to look at a map of Wyoming to see the distances between towns, it's not dense and close together like it is in so much of the USA where even rural communities are separated by only a few miles and it's farmland between them with a lot of farms. "fly over country" does apply here; I've flown recently to Buffalo and Sheridan (typically, at 1,800' to 2,000' AGL) from my SE Wyoming location and it was quite some time between flying over any development whatsoever; a landmark for me in that trip is Guernsey with Wheatland off in the distance, otherwise, nothing. I don't even see Cheyenne in that trip. Similarly, I flew to Valentine NE a few weeks ago and there was nothing ... no communities whatsoever ... that I flew over in a direct line from my airstrip to Valentine. There were isolated ranches where you could spot the miles of desolate road that were used to access the ranch once somebody left the isolated county road, many times unpaved and simply a graded roadway hardpacked.
I'd mention that I am a close friend of a prominent neurosurgeon and an internal medicine doc, for decades, who've been doing their time in the emergency room and follow up surgeries. They've told me that an aortic branch tear can occur at speeds as slow as 20 mph, if the blow is delivered from the side. My medical knowledge is rudimentary, but the gist of what they tell me is that the heart swings like a pendulum in that situation as opposed to a frontal blow. We were discussing this following a fatal bicycle collision where one bicyclist t-boned another during an off-road race and the result was fatal. They mentioned this was how another good friend of ours, an internal medicine MD, died when he hit a tree while skiing backwards on a modest slope while watching his friends coming down an intermediate hill. At the scene of the accident, it was presumed that he'd sustained a head injury, but the autopsy revealed the aortic tear.
Note: Wyoming doesn't have a smaller population than just about everybody else, it is the benchmark of the smallest population of any state in the union.
Have traveled this stretch of road 10 times in the last several months; the signage is there advising headlight use ... but I didn't travel this road before the signage was posted. So I don't know if they've changed any of the other stuff about the road.
They do post signs advising when the next passing lane will be ahead, so that's a help for some of the impatient.
I've been traveling this with my RV, so 65 mph is my top highway speed and I've had very few vehicles to pass there. I've been passed a few times by fellows with pick-up trucks towing trailers where I felt that the gap in oncoming traffic was minimal ... so I've slowed down and allowed them to pass a little quicker. Didn't adversely affect my travels and I'd rather err on the side of caution then otherwise; life's too short when you're traveling 800-1000 miles per week to get aggravated over some of the discourteous on the road.
Prior to that headlight area, there were 7 or 8 accidents, resulting in fatalities, in less than a year. A few of them were head on. When they started the headlight area, they added the signs warning of passing lanes. Personally, I have never seen anything on that stretch of road that was dangerous, other than a few idiots that make it a raceway.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the state with the highest traffic fatality rate is... you got it Wyoming.
I worked as an underwriter for a smaller insurance company that wrote Wyoming auto insurance from the early to late eighties. The revelation made in this quote was as true then as it is now. For whatever reasons, Wyoming has always had a very high fatality rate.
I know that the our Senior Vice-President wanted us to be in Wyoming so he could use his vacations as a business trip (visit a couple of insurance agents) and write the whole thing off as a business expense. He was fond of saying, "There is nothing to do in Wyoming besides sightseeing so natives go to the bars. And since there is no such thing as a bus or taxi service, they drive their vehicles to and from--and at speeds unlike those in the midwest and south. Sooooo-------"
Since we had pretty crappy statisitics in that small company (now defunct), I expect it may have been more his conjecture than any solid evidence. But as a company, we DID have a lot of traffic fatalities.
From the few statistics I remember seeing, the number of accidents per thousand was less than many other states, but the fatality rate was higher. Could have been seatbelts, could have been longer response times, or anything else anyone might have mentioned on this thread. All I know is that the NHTSA is not revealing anything that is unknown to the insurance world---at least not to the one I lived in 30 years ago.
Want to lessen your chances of both accidents and fatalities from driving vehicles? Drive during the day, don't exceed the speed limit, don't text and drive, eat and drive, or even smoke and drive. Statistically there are more accidents at night, at higher speeds, with distracted drivers, and, of course, with drinking drivers. Worst time of all to drive? Between 10:00 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. on a Friday nite/Saturday morning. I can even remember a statistic that Travlers had way back in the early seventies. A recently divorced person was six percent more likely to be involved in an auto accident the first year after he/she was divorced. Occupations with a statistically higher chance of being in an accident included coal miners (I was in Kentucky then so not pointing fingers at coal mining which was and is as big in KY as in WY). Insurance companies are prohibited from keeping both marital divorce record and occupational statistical data now.
I've been out of the business of underwriting and ratemaking for over ten years now, so the statistics may be somewhat different, but people being people, I expect not.
Last edited by ElkHunter; 12-28-2012 at 04:55 PM..
Reason: Fixed quote marks
It will be interesting to see if West Texas fatalities go up. For years their speed limit has been 80 mph. Recently, they passed a law making the speed limit 85.
Why would the fatality rate go up? People were already driving 85 before the politicians changed the speed limit signs. Just like people were driving faster than 55 when the national speed limit was 55. Isn't it amazing how the world did not end when the 55mph speed limit was abolished - speed limits went up and fatalities went down.
I did a little checking to see where the fatalities were happening and although I couldn't get recent data, 2011 or 2012, I did get the data for 2010 and found it very interesting. Our interstate system does NOT claim the most casualties. As a matter of fact, it appears that the fatalities are spread pretty evenly throughout the state. I really didn't see any one area that appeared more dangerous, or at least, one area that had more than it's fair share. In this link is all the data, along with a map showing where the fatalities occured. http://www.dot.state.wy.us/files/con...%20Summary.pdf
Not aimed at anyone in-particular, but I gotta vent:
If there is a posted speed limit of 65mph, and you DON'T have flashing-lights on your vehicle (ie: law enforcement, ambulance, fire-truck, etc) then I don't care WHO you are, where you come from, or how 'important' you think you are back in the 'real-world'...you have NO justifiable reason for driving 65+ mph.
If my vehicle gets better fuel-mileage between 55-60mph, then I will be driving between those speeds, irregardless of WHO is behind me, or how much of a 'hurry' they happen to think (for whatever reason) they 'need' to be in.
I am not in a hurry...
E.V.E.R
...because I plan ahead.
A.L.W.A.Y.S.
I don't really CARE what your excuse is, I shouldn't have to risk blowing my engine, or paying more at the fuel-pump because YOU don't know how to drive conservatively.
Unleash 'road-rage' on me, and you are GOING to have problems. Firstly, I am armed...secondly, I DO have access to several good attorney's, and I cannot lie to you about your chances with them.
If you were 'tweaked-out' while driving, or have shown previous (documented) bad-behavior on the road...you WILL be walking and/or bumming-rides for a VERY long time.
You wanna treat Wyomings highways like your private Telladega, Daytona or Laguna-Seca raceway ? Then I suggest you pack up and relocate to the states where that type of driving is more 'commonplace'.
I will not be the one paying the price for your impatience....YOU will.
One way, or another...it will happen.
Happy New Year...let's hope it's a good one, for everybody.
Why would the fatality rate go up? People were already driving 85 before the politicians changed the speed limit signs. Just like people were driving faster than 55 when the national speed limit was 55. Isn't it amazing how the world did not end when the 55mph speed limit was abolished - speed limits went up and fatalities went down.
In the mid to late eighties traffic fatalities dropped due to seatbelt usage being made manadatory. I believe the introduction of air bags in the nineties may also have had some impact. In recent years there has been a continuing drop that has not been identified, but experts have postulated that a combination of higher gas prices and recession which hit younger people with less income very hard may have reduced the NUMBER of young people on the highways. And, of course, the accident rate of 16-21 year olds is (or used to be in my insurance days) almost three times higher than that of adults 30-65.
In the late 1980s, traffic fatalities plummeted for four straight years, largely as a result of increased seat belt use and concerted efforts to stop driving while under the influence. But the cause of this recent drop in fatalities is unclear. USDOT has put considerable energy into addressing driving while distracted, and credits a six percent drop in distracted driving deaths to those efforts. Certainly USDOT’s distracted driving campaign deserves praise for saving lives and for bringing national attention to this deadly problem. But if USDOT’s numbers are correct, the drop in distracted driving deaths accounts for only a fraction of the year-to-year absolute change, and distracted driving deaths have not fallen as a share of total traffic deaths.
As a ratemaker in the insurance business for seventeen of my thirty year career, I CAN tell you what speeding will do to your insurance rates. Most companies have "graded" surcharges for a single ticket that might be for instance 10% more for 1-15 miles per hour over the speed limit and 25% more for 16+ miles per hour over. Statistical data I had available definitely showed exceeding the speed limit--whatever that limit is---resulted in more fatalities, and therefore we could justify surcharges on speeders to the various insurance departments.
Failure to use seat belts equals == death. The death rate is much, much greater for failure to use seatbelts. On a personal note, I lost a sister-in-law in an accident thirty years ago. She always wore her seatbelt driving her own car or while in ours. But one day she was riding with a friend who did not buckle hers, so she didn't either and---. It was not even a high speed accident, but she was thrown from the car and her head hit the pavement.
So drive fast if you want, but understand statistically you have increased not only your odds of death, but those of every person you pass in either direction. And get caught speeding---your gonna pay through the nose for your auto insurance (as if any of us aren't already!).
Not aimed at anyone in-particular, but I gotta vent:
If there is a posted speed limit of 65mph, and you DON'T have flashing-lights on your vehicle (ie: law enforcement, ambulance, fire-truck, etc) then I don't care WHO you are, where you come from, or how 'important' you think you are back in the 'real-world'...you have NO justifiable reason for driving 65+ mph.
If my vehicle gets better fuel-mileage between 55-60mph, then I will be driving between those speeds, irregardless of WHO is behind me, or how much of a 'hurry' they happen to think (for whatever reason) they 'need' to be in.
I am not in a hurry...
E.V.E.R
...because I plan ahead.
A.L.W.A.Y.S.
I don't really CARE what your excuse is, I shouldn't have to risk blowing my engine, or paying more at the fuel-pump because YOU don't know how to drive conservatively.
Unleash 'road-rage' on me, and you are GOING to have problems. Firstly, I am armed...secondly, I DO have access to several good attorney's, and I cannot lie to you about your chances with them.
If you were 'tweaked-out' while driving, or have shown previous (documented) bad-behavior on the road...you WILL be walking and/or bumming-rides for a VERY long time.
You wanna treat Wyomings highways like your private Telladega, Daytona or Laguna-Seca raceway ? Then I suggest you pack up and relocate to the states where that type of driving is more 'commonplace'.
I will not be the one paying the price for your impatience....YOU will.
One way, or another...it will happen.
Happy New Year...let's hope it's a good one, for everybody.
Nice comment, Lt, even if on the angry side! It reminds me of George Carlin's joke about drivers. A driver going slower than you, especially on a two-lane, holding you back from your destination, "IS AN IDIOT!." One going faster than you, riding your tail and taking a chance of passing on a curve, "IS A MANIAC!"
Most of us think OUR driving, whether it's over or under the speed limit, is the correct limit for EVERYBODY!
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Accident rate
It reminds me of George Carlin's joke about drivers. A driver going slower than you, especially on a two-lane, holding you back from your destination, "IS AN IDIOT!." One going faster than you, riding your tail and taking a chance of passing on a curve, "IS A MANIAC!"
