Two Lansing area residents die in separate car accidents

A 56 year old man died on June 8th following a single car accident while traveling on MLK in Lansing. The van drove off the road, hit a guardrail and flipped over. It’s not clear why the van to left the road at this time, although it is suspected by police there may have been a medical issue involved in the crash.

A separate, second accident involving a 76 year old motorcyclist also resulted in death on June 2nd. According to reports, Thomas Graham was riding his motorcycle when he drove into a ditch and was thrown from his motorcycle. While Mr. Graham was wearing a helmet, he unfortunately died at the scene of the crash.

According to statistics recently released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, car accident related deaths have decreased over the last 4 years. In 2008, the last year statistics were available, 34,017 people died as a result of a car accident. This is just over a 10% reduction since 2005, but still represents a significant amount of people who die using transportation. As noted by the New York Times, speeding is involved in almost a 1/3 of all accident deaths. It’s clear there are a significant number of deaths related to car crashes, but it’s not clear what is being done to fix this problem.

If I told you nearly 100 people died every day in America from terrorism, I believe something would be done immediately to fix this problem. Why is it then that when I say the same thing, which is actually true for auto accident and not true for terrorism, that there is hardly a peep about the staggering number of traffic deaths? I don’t have the answer, but I believe someone should be starting to ask these questions, especially what can be done to make road travel safer.