An estimated 37,810 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States last year, a 12 percent decline from 2024, according to preliminary figures released by the National Safety Council — a rare piece of encouraging news for a country that has long struggled to reduce the human toll of its roads. The decline came even as Americans drove more: total miles traveled rose by roughly 0.9 percent over the same period.
The figures represent the sharpest improvement in years, and safety experts were quick to note what they saw as evidence that a sustained, if unglamorous, campaign of policy changes, technological upgrades and public education was beginning to pay off.
“The decrease in roadway fatalities is more than a number,” said Lorraine Martin, chief executive of the National Safety Council. “It represents lives saved and families kept whole.”
The declines were not evenly distributed. Washington, D.C., led the nation with a 52 percent drop in traffic deaths, followed by California at 40 percent and Rhode Island at 29 percent. Seven other states — Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Connecticut, Maryland and South Dakota — each recorded declines of 16 percent or more.
Not every state shared in the progress. Hawaii saw a 25 percent increase in traffic deaths, the largest jump in the country, followed by Wyoming at 12 percent and Kansas at 10 percent. Five other states — New Mexico, Idaho, Louisiana, Vermont and Colorado — also recorded increases, though more modest ones.
Safety researchers and advocates attributed the overall improvement to a combination of factors, including advances in vehicle technology, infrastructure investment and a growing network of organizations working toward what was once considered an almost utopian goal: eliminating traffic fatalities entirely by 2050. That effort, coordinated through the Road to Zero Coalition — a national alliance of more than 650 organizations established in partnership with the Department of Transportation and led by the National Safety Council — has sought to shift the country away from treating traffic deaths as an inevitable cost of modern life.
The coalition promotes what safety planners call the Safe System Approach, a framework that distributes responsibility for road safety across five domains: road design, vehicle engineering, driver behavior, speed management and emergency medical response. The model, which has shown measurable success in several European countries, has gained traction among American transportation officials in recent years.
Despite the progress, officials cautioned that the underlying causes of most traffic deaths — speeding, distracted driving and impaired driving — remained as prevalent as ever. Those behaviors, they noted, cut across all categories of road users, killing pedestrians, cyclists, passengers and drivers alike.
The National Safety Council is pushing federal regulators to accelerate the adoption of technologies it says have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing crashes, among them speed safety cameras, intelligent speed assistance systems, advanced impaired-driving prevention tools and automatic emergency braking. The council also called on the Department of Transportation to maintain its commitment to the zero-fatality goal and to broaden its collaboration with other federal agencies, including the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services.
The council has tracked traffic fatality estimates since 1913. Its figures draw on data from the National Center for Health Statistics and include deaths that occur within 100 days of a crash, on both public roads and private property such as parking lots and driveways — a broader measure than some other federal tallies.