I’ve lived in Cedar City for close to thirty years, but I’ve almost been hit by drivers blatantly running red lights three times in the last month, compared to once in all the years before. Red lights, not yellow lights that turned red. I’ve also seen four drivers running stop signs, not slowing instead of stopping and then speeding up, but running them full speed… and not in the middle of the night when no one was around. I know of at least two recent accidents where a driver ignored a red light and caused an accident, one of which resulted in the death of a motorcyclist.
The Utah State Highway patrol has also reported that highway speeds, accidents, and deaths are up dramatically in the past year – the average speeds appearing to the fastest ever, even though speed limits haven’t changed. I’ve been passed on Main Street, when driving the speed limit [25-45 mph, depending on locale] by drivers who had to be going close to sixty, and frequently, not just occasionally. On the interstate, while going 82 mph in an 80 mph area, I found that to avoid causing a traffic back-up I had to move up to 85 mph, and people were still passing me, going at least 90 mph.
But this isn’t confined to Utah, either. Neighboring Colorado registered the highest number highway deaths in twenty years in 2021. And late in 2021, the federal government reported that road fatalities spiked the first half of 2021, the largest increase ever recorded in its reporting system’s history during a six-month period, nearly a twenty percent increase from the same period in 2020. Incidents of speeding and not using seatbelts were also found to be higher than before the pandemic.
Then there’s this pandemic, where statistics demonstrate rather conclusively that being vaccinated and wearing a mask reduces your chance of being hospitalized and/or dying. Data from New York shows that of those recently hospitalized for COVID, the unvaccinated were more than 32 times likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated and even more likely than that to die and/or suffer long-term complications.
I just wonder if all those people speeding and running red lights are the same ones who aren’t getting vaccinated, especially here in Cedar City, where only 47% of the eligible population is vaccinated.