Deer in the Headlights

Reading the title of this blog post you might think I am going to be writing about some politician being stopped in their tracks by a question they are dumbfounded on how to answer.

Think of Gary Johnson being asked about Aleppo. Or the foreign leader he most respects.

Or Hillary Clinton going into a frozen stare two months ago during a campaign speech when a couple of protestors shouted out to her.

This blog post is about nothing like that.

It is really about deer in the headlights on the roads across the United States of America.

I got interested in this topic more than 25 years ago when I was going to give a presentation to a group in Ohio and I heard on the radio while I was driving there that  37,000 accidents involving deer and motor vehicles had occurred in the last year in the state.

37,000 accidents involving deer in one year! That seemed to me like an incredible amount of financial havoc caused by Bambi and her friends. It was especially true as I remember rarely seeing deer out and about when I grew up in the 1960's. And I lived some of those years in a very rural area. I used that statistic in my speech that day and I have never forgotten it. 

The statistic became personal several years later when both my daughter and wife collided with deer on the roads of Western Pennsylvania when we lived in suburban Pittsburgh. It became even more personal when someone I knew hit a deer with his car and the deer ended up crashing through the windshield and crushing his passenger to death. It also was no longer rare to see deer, even in fairly well populated suburban areas.

I came across the graphic below that State Farm Insurance produced that was in a recent article in The Washington Post  entitled "Here's How Likely You Are To Crash Into A Deer Based On Where You Live."

Considering that there are more than 1 million accidents in the USA each year in which deer are involved, which also results in more than 200 deaths, it bears knowing something about the subject.

Driving in West Virginia brings the greatest likelihood that you will collide with a deer. 1 in 41. Pennsylvania is second with chances of 1 in 67. However, Pennsylvania has the greatest absolute number of total deer-vehicle collisions---over 115,000 per year.

On the other side of the equation, your odds are only 1 in 18,955 of seeing a deer in the headlights in Hawaii.

The total economic cost of the repairs to the vehicles involved in these collisions with deer?

State Farm puts that number at more than $4 billion per year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that there are just over 10 million vehicles involved in police-reported traffic accidents each year. This means that collisions with deer make up about 10% of all vehicle accidents.

We hear a lot about driving under the influence but how much do we hear about the dangers of driving into a deer?

Let's put that in context. As stated above, there are over 115,000 deer collisions in Pennsylvania each year. However, the total number of accidents caused by driving and drinking in that state is less than 10% of that number---10,550 in 2014.

That's right, the numbers seem to suggest that you are ten times as likely to be involved in an accident with a sober deer than with a drunk driver.

One of the reasons there are so many deer collisions on our roads is that the deer population has exploded since the turn of the century (after being decimated in the 19th century). There are actually more deer in the U.S. today than there were at the founding of the nation in 1776. 

Credit: www.deerfriendly.com

Of course, this increase in the deer population pales in comparison to the increase in motor vehicles on the road in the U.S. over the last century or so.

In 1900, there were only 8,000 motor vehicles registered in the United States. In 2016 there are 262 million cars and light truck vehicles alone.

The results are predictable.

Tens of millions of deer bounding around while hundreds of millions of motor vehicles barrel down the highway means that there are millions of chances for a collision. And over a million times a deer and car will meet in circumstances that will not be pleasant for either party.

What can you do to keep from running into that deer in the headlights?

The Washington Post article makes these suggestions as we head into deer mating season which make the risks of collision even higher this time of year.

Buckle up, keep your eyes on the road and not your phone, pay attention to deer-crossing signs. High beams can help (but, please, don’t blind oncoming drivers). And if a deer darts in front of you, don’t swerve — that can cause you to run into a tree or another car.

 
Drive safely.

Beware drunk drivers. However, be especially careful about those dreaded deer.