While Canada has seen a steady drop in deadly car crashes over the last decade, the United States has seen a significant rise, a new study shows.
That difference is largely because Canada has stronger laws around distracted driving, seat belt use and impaired driving, researchers say.
“I think there is more will [in Canada] and more things have been done in a more effective way than they have in the United States,” said Rebecca Weast, a senior research scientist with the U.S.-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and a co-author of the study. “You’re doing a lot better than we are with [several types of crashes].”
In the U.S., the number of fatal crashes per year rose by 33 per cent between 2011 and 2021 – to 43,230 from 32,479.
In Canada, fatal crashes per year decreased 18 per cent to 1,776 in 2020 from 2,166 in 2010, the most recent year with available numbers.
During that time, Canada’s population, number of licensed drivers and distance driven all increased at a greater pace than in the U.S., Weast said.
To put that in perspective, in the U.S., roughly 118 out of every million people died in a crash in 2020 – compared to 46 per million in Canada.
‘Complicated issue’
So why are Canada’s roads safer?
While Weast said “it’s a really complicated issue” because laws vary by state and province, she pointed to a number of policies here, including lower top speed limits, growing use of photo radar in many cities and strict laws around seatbelts, using mobile devices while driving and impaired driving.
For example, while all states except New Hampshire have laws requiring that everyone wears a seat belt in the front seat, 16 states either don’t have rear seat-belt laws at all or they apply only to minors, according to the American Automobile Association.
Another example of stronger laws in Canada is that even though the blood alcohol limit (BAC) for impaired driving under the Criminal Code is .08 per cent, every province and territory except Quebec and Yukon has administrative laws that allow police to suspend your licence on the spot if your BAC is more than .05 per cent (.04 in Saskatchewan).
But in the U.S., all but a handful of states use just the .08 limit for anyone over 21.
Also, since 2018, police in Canada have been able to demand a roadside breath test from any driver even if they don’t have reason to suspect that the driver is impaired. That’s not the case in the U.S.
“This stems from the philosophy that more prominently underpins criminal laws in Canada, which is the emphasis on the greater good of the community,” said Robyn Robertson, chief executive officer of the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF), an Ottawa-based non-profit, which also worked on the study. “This is in contrast to prevailing emphasis in the U.S. on the protection of individual rights.”
American exceptionalism?
Among 29 high-income countries, the U.S. has the highest per capita crash fatality rate – more than twice the average of the other 28, Weast said.
But Canada ranks 14th and we shouldn’t rest on our laurels, TIRF’s Robertson said.
One of the problems we’re facing is a shortage of police officers to enforce the traffic laws we have, she said.
There’s also been a backlash to photo radar, even though it has been shown to slow down drivers and reduce collisions. Alberta, for instance, has been limiting where cities can use it.
“I think if we see continued erosion of automated enforcement options, crashes will increase as the deterrent effects of laws is eroded,” Robertson said. “This will only serve to increase pressure and demands on policing, which is already stretched thin.”
In the U.S., there are also political hurdles to passing laws that make roads safer.
“The politicization of the issue is above my pay grade as a scientist,” Weast said, adding that public education is also a way to get people to be safer on the road. “The way to reach the people [in certain communities] is to trigger their sense of personal responsibility. And then in other communities they will say, no… it should be handled by the government. And because of the variability, there isn’t a single approach to fix the problem.”