- Tuesday, February 21, 2017

After years of slow but steady decline, traffic fatalities on the nation’s highways and byways are increasing again. If the death and injury toll continues to rise in the years ahead, it’s likely the fault of government supervision gone awry.

The National Safety Council’s preliminary figures for 2016, released last week, reveal that as many as 40,000 people died in car crashes last year. That’s up 6 percent over 2015, and a remarkable 14 percent rise over 2014. The safety council, which has been collecting these statistics since 1921 when there were few paved roads and few cars on them, says it’s “the most dramatic two-year escalation since 1964.”

Making matters even worse, 4.6 million drivers, passengers and pedestrians were injured seriously enough to require medical attention in 2016. Grief and loss aside, that costs society upward of $432 billion a year.

The rising death and injury toll is attributed to the improving economy and relatively low gasoline prices, which encourage more drivers to drive more miles for both work and pleasure.

But there’s another factor that accelerates highway carnage, the rising high corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards imposed by the Obama administration. These standards were mandated in 2012 by the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, and demand that automobile manufacturers achieve a fleetwide fuel economy equivalent to 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light-duty trucks by the 2025 model year. This followed an earlier CAFE standards increase to 35.5 miles per gallon last year.

Is that two-year increase in highway fatalities from 2014 to 2016 of 14 percent just a coincidence? That seems unlikely. What is not unlikely is that the number of deaths and injuries will continue to rise as the 2025 standards are phased in over the next eight years unless they are rescinded, revised or reduced by the new administration.

“The administration’s national program to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will save consumers more than $1.7 trillion at the gasoline pump and reduce U.S. oil consumption by 12 billion barrels,” the Obama White House boasted in the announcement of the 54.5 miles per gallon mandate. This sounded all to the good, but maybe it’s not.

The only way automobile manufacturers can make that goal will be to use lighter-weight materials in the cars and light trucks. That means more plastic and composites, and less steel. This is done in the pursuit of Mr. Obama’s radical environmental agenda of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Trying to have it both ways, Mr. Obama late in his presidency took credit for the falling price of a gallon of gasoline, as if his policies had very much to do with falling prices at the pump. That’s akin to entering a marathon at the 25th mile and crossing the finish line first.

Mr. Obama’s first energy secretary, Steven Chu, a physicist, told The Wall Street Journal in 2008 that raising the price of gasoline was the way to encourage energy economics. “Somehow,” he said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” he said. That would be $9 to $10 a gallon.

Mr. Chu recanted his bright idea four years later. What’s good for an Italian motorist in a Fiat or a Frenchman in a Renault is not necessarily acceptable for an American motorist in a Buick.

Rolling back the Obama administration’s unrealistic CAFE standards is not on the government’s to-do list, perhaps because the National Safety Council is directed by Deborah A.P. Hersman, who previously served as Mr. Obama’s chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Maybe the new administration will include this in its promised fix-it list.

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