On the evening of March 11, 21-year-old Joshua Schmid veered his Subaru sedan wide in a curve of Washougal River Road and slammed head-on into an oncoming vehicle.
Schmid was killed in the collision. His passenger and the driver of the other vehicle were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. Before the crash, witnesses reported seeing his car driving north, and overtaking other cars on a road mostly marked for no passing by double, solid yellow center lines.
The incident was tragic, and its circumstances — a young driver going too fast and colliding into an oncoming vehicle — are among the most common contributing and often overlapping factors of serious injury and fatal collisions in Clark County and Washington.
In Schmid’s case, the fact that he was a male made him even more likely to be involved in a serious collision.
“If you look at young male drivers between about 21 to 25 (years old), even up as high as 34, they’re involved at a much higher rate in all crashes in general than women,” said Shelly Baldwin, spokeswoman for the Washington Traffic Safety Commission. “The only area where that is not true is the shocking area of distract(ed driving), where women are 50/50 with men.”
Youth, speed, and multiple vehicles are three factors on a list that about 20 state transportation officials are focused on reducing as part of Target Zero — an effort to bring the number of fatal and serious injury crashes down to zero statewide by the year 2030. But after decades of progress toward that goal, the number of fatal and serious injury crashes in Clark County and statewide are trending upward.
“It’s happened not just here. It’s happened nationally,” said Baldwin. “We were on this super wonderful downward trend since the early 2000s. The upward trend has been really difficult to understand.”
The Washington Traffic Safety Commission is the state’s highway safety office working on Target Zero. The office gathers traffic-death and serious-injury data from government organizations around Washington in order to identify the factors behind them and fund projects statewide to mitigate them.
Preliminary statewide figures for 2016 show 20 people were killed and 130 were seriously injured in collisions in Clark County. That’s down from 24 deaths and 152 serious injuries in 2015, but still part of a rising trend that began recently. In 2009, 14 people were killed on Clark County roadways. In 2012, 110 — the fewest in years — were seriously hurt.
Baldwin said there are no concrete answers to explain the trend, but there are theories. For example, one reason why crashes dropped so low might be because the recession, which pushed gas prices upward and earnings downward, severely affected young males; but when the economy turned around, that age group had more purchasing power.
“A lot of our target 21- to 34-year-old male drivers were perhaps more sensitive to the recession … that age group, they could have had to reduce the amount of driving for pleasure that they had been doing up to that point,” she said. “When the recession ended, we had earnings increase and gas prices drop; that could have also provided more opportunities for that group that seems to be the biggest risk. Do I have proof that’s what happened? No.”
The state classifies collision factors into three priority levels based on the percentage of traffic fatalities and serious injuries with which they’re associated. Some new factors have emerged through the years, and others, particularly driving while intoxicated, have remained stubbornly present.
According to Baldwin, in the 1980s close to 1,000 people per year died on Washington’s highways, and intoxicated drivers were involved about half the time. Today, roadway fatalities have dropped to around the mid-500s. However, the number of drivers who were intoxicated is still around half.
Looking at the years 2014 through 2016 (the most recent official data available), the state’s Target Zero priority 1 ranking of collision factors are: impaired driving, running off the road, speeding, young drivers aged 16-25 and distracted driving.
For the same period of time, Clark County’s list bucks the state trend. Here, impaired drivers were also involved in about half of fatal crashes, but young drivers between ages 16 and 25 were the second largest contributing factor. They were involved in about a third of fatal crashes and 40 percent of serious injury crashes. Third on the list were distracted drivers, who appeared in about a third of all fatal and serious injury crashes.
“Even though it’s recorded in 30 percent of crashes it’s likely very under reported,” said Dr. Staci Hoff, the research director for the Traffic Safety Commission. She added that distraction, while commonly associated with cell phones, can be anything that causes drivers to look away from the road. “Officers are not likely to put it down on a hunch, yet it’s still coded in 30 percent of fatal crashes. Imagine what the rate really is with people out there having the sense (after a crash) to be like ‘heck no.'”
Interestingly, speed was a factor in only 26 percent of Clark County’s fatal crashes whereas it was involved in about a third of crashes statewide. Clark County’s list is rounded out by fatal crashes at intersections, running off the road, which were also involved about 26 percent of the time.
Sergeant Timothy Wilson of the Battle Ground Police Department, who works on Target Zero initiatives at the local level, said Clark County is showing some improvements. Fewer pedestrians are dying in traffic accidents and midyear 2017 data shows impairment-related fatalities are also decreasing.
“Clark County used to have the highest pedestrian deaths per capita in the state,” he said. “We’re in the second year of a $60,000 grant to address that … We have to get a couple years behind us, but where we’re at, we’re seeing a small decrease.”
Wilson said police work to suppress impaired driving, Target Zero’s top priority, with targeted marketing campaigns during weeks leading up to big regional events, and by conducting walkthroughs at bars on occasional weekend nights. They also go to driving schools to key in on young drivers and emphasize the risks of driving while intoxicated.
Of course, police also write tickets when people are breaking the law, such as when they drive too fast, or while drunk or on drugs, but citations don’t preempt people from getting behind the wheel and killing or injuring someone.
“How long have people known it’s illegal to drink and drive?” Wilson asked, rhetorically. “We’ve had decades of campaigns to try to curb people from making these decisions, yet they’re still making them. In my view, it’s going to take a societal change. It’s not something we can arrest our way out off.”
