(EXPANDED FROM 7/31/2020)
I have driven past the above-shown memorial for so many years that I was surprised to see it gone last summer, presumably because of a road-improvement project. While making this stretch of road safer is a good thing, it was unfortunate that the memorial couldn’t have been relocated rather than removed.
The reason why is that memorials like this can help counteract American society’s tendency to not talk about how automobiles can be deadly. This is most obviously seen in the car-buff media, where a “boys with toys” mentality prevails. However, auto fatalities also tend to receive little attention elsewhere in American culture aside from breathless media coverage of a celebrity’s death.
Curtis White (2003, p. 105) once noted that every 10 years “we wipe out the population of four cities the size of the one in which I live, Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Dead. And we leave a population the equivalent of a major metropolitan area (close to three million) as walking wounded, carting around the pain of pins in their ankles, knees like pudding, and ruptured vertebrae. Where is the memorial to those deaths and wounds?”
Auto fatality memorials tend to be in rural areas
When White’s words were published in 2003, the annual death toll was 42,884 (Wikipedia, 2024a). By 2011 it fell 24 percent to 32,479 but grew to 43,230 in 2021. By 2023, the last year when data was available, fatalities declined slightly to 40,990.
What that means is that in the last 19 years there has been a grand total of 756,028 traffic fatalities (Wikipedia, 2024a). This is almost eight times more than the number of U.S. military deaths associated with the Vietnam and Korean wars. Or within the ballpark of twice a many deaths as in World War II (Wikipedia, 2024b).
So where are our memorials? My experience is that they are most likely to show up in rural areas. A case in point is a lonely stretch of Highway 101 near Humptulips, Washington. Close to the top of a mild grade were two crosses a few yards away from the two-lane road. Those memorials were unusually large and well-decorated so a decade ago I took a few photographs.
The images raise a variety of questions — most notably, what happened? I started to do some research but decided to let the photos speak for themselves. That was partly to respect the privacy of the families but also to not become so focused on an individual situation that this essay loses sight of the larger issue: the automobile is not a benign instrument.
The car can stop being a toy rather quickly
Yes, cars and roadways have become safer. The 2023 death toll was 25 percent lower than the peak year of 54,589 in 1972. In addition, auto fatalities are far lower than other leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer, according to data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics (2025).
That said, traffic safety experts have expressed concerns that fatalities in 2023 were 25 percent higher than only a decade ago. In addition, the number deaths increased for pedestrians (16 percent) and bicyclists (29 percent) since 2018, according to the National Transportation Research Project (2024).
Over the years I have rarely seen car-buff websites talk about the dangers of automobiles. One of the best examples I can point to is a comment in The Truth About Cars by Pch101 (2014):
“It’s amazing how one can go from being very alive to being very dead in the bat of an eyelash. It’s probably best not to dwell on it, but ignoring the risks altogether can lead to poor decision making. The human body was not meant to travel more than a few miles per hour; we were engineered accordingly, and traveling any speed much above that is a crapshoot.”
Another example was TTAC contributor Steve Lang (2014), who wrote about how shaken he felt after a close call he experienced while driving. To which commentator FreedMike (2014) responded, “Glad you lived to tell the tale, Mr. Lang . . . go home, have a beer, and have some excellent sex tonight.”
To acknowledge automotive deaths does not make one “anti-car” or overly fearful of modern life. It makes one human.
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on December 29, 2016 and expanded on July 21, 2020 and March 9, 2025.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- FreedMike; 2014. Commentator in, “Question Of The Day: What Was Your Closest Call?” The Truth About Cars. Posted June 23; accessed June 24.
- National Center for Health Statistics; 2025. “Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Week Results.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed March 9.
- National Transportation Research Project; 2024. “News Release: 2023 U.S. Traffic Fatalities 25 Percent Higher than a Decade Before, Despite Dropping Each Year Since 2021…” Released July 2.
- Pch101; 2014. Commentator in, “Average Car Price Affordable Only To Washington, DC Customers.” The Truth About Cars. Posted March 14.
- White, Curtis; 2003. The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. HarperCollins, New York, NY.
- Wikipedia; 2024a. “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year.” Accessed March 9.
- ——–; 2024b. “United States military casualties of war.” Accessed July 28.
Driver training programs haven’t progressed anywhere near the rate at which vehicle safety has… you can still fail your license test if you can’t parallel park. Meanwhile cars can now do that for you.
I can only speak for this area, but the Harrisburg region includes three interstate highways (the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I-81 and I-83), along with suburban arteries and plenty of two-lane rural roads.
The majority of fatalities are young males (although young females appear to be closing the gap) driving on two-lane rural roads after 11 p.m. Alcohol and a failure to wear safety belts are often involved.
Given those factors, it’s less about unsafe vehicles and/or road design than on the deceased making poor decisions, and suffering the consequences. That tends to mute the outcry over traffic fatalities. You can take the horse to water…but you can’t always make him buckle his safety belt and not drive under the influence.
Geeber, you inspired me to look up the statistics for my state, which is Washington. In 2020 the biggest source of car crashes was by teen drivers, although “distracted-driving” accidents were very close behind. Drunk-driving accidents came in third. The statistics did not break out the frequency of accidents due to bad weather, which can be a real issue during the winter.
I live in a semi-rural area eight miles out of town. The main two-lane road into town has five memorials. Only one of the deaths was apparently related to dangerous road design. Even in my neighborhood there was a fatal crash when a young person drove upwards of 90 miles per hour on a winding residential street.