AAA Study: Crashes Cost You $1,051 a Year
Yes, even if you haven’t been in a crash recently, AAA reports in a study released today that auto accidents cost U.S. drivers $164 billion a year, or about $1,051 per person. To put that in perspective, the report says traffic congestion only costs us $67 billion a year.
AAA considered factors like property damage, lost earnings, medical costs, the cost for police and other emergency services, legal costs, and travel delays when it pulled together the report. One of the most interesting things it found was that drivers in smaller cities were hit harder (no pun intended) by crashes than drivers in big cities. For example, in L.A. crash costs top $10 billion a year, but that’s only about $817 per person. In Little Rock-North Little Rock, Ark., the total was $1.4 billion, or about $2,258 per person.
To try to lower those costs, AAA is asking lawmakers to focus more on safety and toughen laws against drunken drivers, while making driving without a seat belt a primary offense. That means cops could pull over a driver for that offense alone. Only about half of the 50 U.S. states already have that law.
According to the Associated Press, researchers found that crashes in various U.S. cities cost:
- $1,439 a person in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area
- $1,368 a person in Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale, Ariz.
- $1,058 a person in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash., area
- $1,051 a person, national average
- $887 a person in the Chicago metropolitan area
- $868 a person in the Detroit metropolitan region
- $658 a person in the San Francisco Bay Area
Study: Traffic Crashes Cost Billions (Washington Post)
