Our rural areas have smaller populations, but a higher percentage of the highway deaths.

The U.S. Department of Transportation puts it at 43% of all roadway deaths despite having only 20% of the population. That’s 17,283 traffic fatalities in rural areas in 2022 alone.

The biggest problem: roadway departure crashes. Too much speed. Too much distraction. You saw that curve too late. Remember:

• A car traveling 70 miles per hour needs almost 400 feet of stopping distance, and 750 feet in wet conditions.
  

• Reacting one second earlier lets you stop 100 feet sooner.
  

And PLEASE look out for farm equipment. North Carolina has more than 200 crashes a year involving farm vehicles and fatalities are FIVE TIMES more likely in crashes involving farm vehicles.

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State lawmakers listen to a breakfast presentation on wildlife crossings June 23, 2026.

Wildlife collisions are preventable. In fact, crossing projects in key areas of Colorado and Washington cut wildlife / vehicle collisions by 90%.

That’s not just a lot of animals, it’s a lot of people, and a lot of money. Consider:

• North Carolina recorded about 57,000 wildlife collisions in just 3 years.
  

• Those crashes caused five human deaths, 2,800 injuries and $157 million in property damage.
  

• At least 7% of ALL crashes statewide involve an animal.
  

That’s why it’s such good news that, last week, the North Carolina House and the North Carolina Senate approved $10.2 million in recurring state funding for wildlife crossings!

The decision now rests with Gov. Josh Stein to sign that budget into law, but this funding is exactly what Safe Passage hoped to see in the budget. With Congress considering $400 million in national funding for these projects, this state aid could allow federal money to flow here at a 9-to-1 ratio – $9 in federal funding for every $1 in state support.

“It’s a high-return investment,” Wanda Payne, a Safe Passage liaison to the NC Department of Transportation, said last month during a breakfast event with state lawmakers . “It’s a win for safety, and a win for fiscal responsibility and a win for North Carolina.”

The New York Times published an in-depth look last month at a major factor behind the increase in U.S. pedestrian deaths: The growing size of vehicles.

Bigger trucks with higher hoods mean pedestrians struck head on are more likely to be knocked down and run over, as opposed to rolling onto the hood. And the larger hoods, as well as the larger “A pillars” needed to protect drivers from a rollover in large pickup trucks, mean larger blind spots. The Times said that:

• To analyze how these blind zones have changed, we used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sightlines in four of the most common pickups today — the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma — with their counterparts from the 1990s or early 2000s.
  

• The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled.
  

• The Sierra’s and the Tacoma’s grew by about 60 percent.
  

• The smallest increase was the F-150’s. Its blind zones grew by about 25 percent.
  

The report goes on:

• More vehicles than ever have hoods that exceed the average American’s center of gravity, which is generally around the belly button.
  

• The hood of an average passenger vehicle today is about three feet high. Anyone shorter than 5-foot-6 — about half of American adults — would frequently be rammed to the pavement. So would most children.
  

The full report is worth spending time on, and you can read it for free.

The Times notes that, since 2009, “the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75 percent,” and that the United States is an outlier among wealthy countries, suggesting that the increase can’t simply be blamed on the rise of cellphones.