Car Crash City: Are car accidents on the rise in Northern Michigan?

“Traffic report.” “Accident blocked.” “Please find an alternative route.”

If you follow the Grand Traverse 911 page on Facebook, you’ve probably seen these phrases in your news feed almost daily. There have been so many such reports in Traverse City lately that locals are wondering if the area will see a historically high number of car accidents in 2024. With the summer peak season ahead of us, The Ticker has crunched the numbers to find out what’s happening on our local roads – and whether it’s business as usual or a turning point.

Brandon Brinks is a traffic enforcement captain for the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office. Brinks says he won’t have a clear idea of ​​how 2024 compares to previous years until January, when he submits his year-end report. But he says the numbers so far are “not unusual.”

According to Brinks, there were 726 car crashes in Grand Traverse County during the first five months of 2024, including 100 crashes with injuries and three fatalities. Those numbers are actually slightly lower than in 2023, when there were 764 crashes, 115 injuries and three deaths between Jan. 1 and May 31. Brinks says the numbers from both years are relatively in line with the county’s baseline.

“From a purely data perspective, I don’t see any differences from other years,” says Brinks.

In terms of full-year numbers, Grand Traverse County’s car crash statistics have remained largely stable over the past decade — and have even declined slightly. Here’s a quick look at the total number of crashes and the number of fatalities from car crashes in Grand Traverse County since 2014, courtesy of Brinks and the Sheriff’s Office.

2014: 2,764 accidents, 7 deaths
2015: 2,484 accidents, 10 deaths
2016: 2,520 accidents, 13 deaths
2017: 2,635 accidents, 9 deaths
2018: 2,843 accidents, 4 deaths
2019: 2,311 accidents, 6 deaths
2020: 2,077 accidents, 2 deaths
2021: 1,964 accidents, 14 deaths
2022: 2,456 accidents, 11 deaths
2023: 2,075 accidents, 14 deaths

The number of accidental injuries has also remained relatively constant over the past decade, says Brinks, and generally ranges between 250 and 400 each year.

As for the decline in car crashes in 2020 and 2021, Brinks says COVID-19 was the biggest disruptor, as curfews, festival and event cancellations, and work-from-home policies changed typical traffic patterns.

“In 2020 and 2021, the number of accidents decreased somewhat, simply because the number of cars on the roads was much lower,” he says The Ticker.

But national trends show that COVID-19 has also changed people’s driving habits – which may explain why Grand Traverse County has seen more traffic fatalities in the last three years than in the three years before.

“Why are American drivers so deadly?” New York Times Magazine asked in an article published earlier this year that found that “after decades of declining fatality rates, the number of dangerous drivers in the United States has started to rise again.” The article attributes these rising fatality rates to a change in driving habits that began in 2020 and coincided with the onset of the pandemic. For example, the article’s author, Matthew Shaer, looked at a rise in crashes in Nevada and wrote that “drivers were speeding… and speeding through intersections with alarming frequency”; that “seat belt enforcement had declined overall”; and that “arrests for drunk driving had risen again to near historic highs.”

Some experts have attributed at least some of these changes in driving behavior to the fact that COVID-19 kept many people at home, roads were less crowded, and drivers felt emboldened to drive faster and more recklessly. But a source cited in the New York Times Magazine The article also suggested that drivers were frustrated with how the pandemic had turned their lives upside down – a frustration that manifested itself in aggressive driving, anger at pedestrians or other drivers, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and more.

Whatever the explanation, Michigan has not been spared from nationwide trends: Last summer, Michigan State Police reported that traffic fatalities in the state had increased 15 percent in just four years, from 974 in 2018 to 1,123 in 2022. And although Grand Traverse County’s sample size is small, the increase in traffic fatalities in the county from the late 2010s to the early 2020s appears to be consistent with the nationwide trend.

Brinks, for his part, believes that the number of traffic fatalities in recent years might have been even higher if there had not been sustained efforts across the region to convert problematic intersections into roundabouts.

“A lot of times there’s no rhyme or reason why fatal car crashes happen,” Brinks says. “But at intersections like 131 and 186, before there was a roundabout there, you could kind of expect problems. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, but you know there’s going to be a fatal crash at an intersection like that at some point. And since we built a roundabout there in 2019, there hasn’t been a fatal crash there since. I know people have different opinions about roundabouts, but they’re really good for the safety of our citizens who travel on our roads. They slow down traffic, they separate traffic, and they’re really good for the safety of our roads.”

With the construction of more roundabouts and other traffic calming measures in and around Traverse City, Brinks hopes that the area will continue to see fewer accidents — and that the death toll will drop back to single digits or even zero. Whatever happens, he says the public perception may be that there are more accidents, if only because police are now doing a better job of publicizing those accidents.

“The dispatch center has gotten better at getting information out to the public immediately,” says Brinks. “They’re really good now at telling people, ‘This road or intersection is closed, please take alternate routes.’ In the past, we might have called WTCM or something to get it over the radio. But we definitely didn’t get the information out nearly as quickly as we do today. And to the average person, that probably makes things seem worse than they are.”