Speed continues to take lives on Tucson’s streets

Image: snapshot of our City of Tucson Traffic Fatalities map, created to help visualize the tragic magnitude of traffic crashes in Tucson

U.S. traffic deaths went up during the first nine months of 2020 despite a decline in traffic due to Coronavirus lockdowns. "Preliminary data tells us that during the national health emergency, fewer Americans drove but those who did took more risks and had more fatal crashes," The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in an open letter to the driving public. The agency cited a recent report showing a 22% increase in speeds in select metropolitan areas.

In 2020, Tucson also saw a surge in fatalities, particularly for motor vehicle and motorcycle drivers and passengers. Tucson Police Departments (TPD) officials confirmed similar trends on Tucson's streets and informed that “excessive speed” was the top factor in most of the recent road deaths. In late January, several local media outlets reported on TPD's increased enforcement efforts in response to hundreds of community complaints about speeding and street racing. “Over the last two years, 169 individuals have lost their lives on our streets, 40% of that is related to speed," stated Capt. James Scott in this alarming AZ Daily Star article.

According to TPD data, 89 people died on our streets in 2020 compared to 79 in 2019. This map shows the magnitude of the tragic loss we have experienced on our streets just in the past four years not to mention the additional toll of serious injuries. Given our high speed, multi-lane street network, we suspect speed may be playing an even bigger role in our traffic crashes and fatalities even when speeding per se is not reported to be a factor.

We, at Living Streets Alliance, continue to advocate for engineering and design solutions to make our streets safer and "self-enforcing" rather than relying on law enforcement which disproportionately targets and inflicts harm on racialized people, and particularly Black communities. (We encourage you to view Arrested Mobility for more on this.)