American Road Deaths Spiked In 2015, And No One Knows Why

In the past decade, American roads have grown marginally safer to motorists and pedestrians, with the lowest annual death toll ever in 2014—a still gruesome 32,675. Today, traffic safety officials warned that those trends reversed in 2015 with a vengeance, and no one yet knows why.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says its estimates of all traffic deaths in the first nine months of 2015, including crashes, motorcyclists and pedestrians, shows a 9.7 percent increase over the same period a year earlier, for a total of roughly 26,000 lives lost. If the trend holds for the entire year, 2015 would have been the most deadly time on American roads since 2008, when 37,423 lives were lost.