GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — There will be hundreds of thousands of crashes on Michigan roads this year, and some of those will be deadly.
In 2016, the most recent year for which finalized statistics are available, there were 312,172 crashes in Michigan; 980 of those were fatal, resulting in the deaths of 1,064 people. Of the fatal crashes, 274 involved alcohol and 239 involved drugs.
Michigan State Police Lt. Jim Flegel is a traffic safety specialist who studies crashes. He tries to figure out what went wrong in each one, but says they all share one thing:
“Unfortunately, the fatal crashes that I look at are 100 percent preventable crashes. There’s something that a person could have done to prevent getting involved in that crash,” he said.
He said advances in autonomous vehicles could decrease the number of crashes because computers don’t make the same mistakes as humans.
Full story: WOOD TV