The federal government released an alarming statistic earlier this month. Last year, the number of people killed in traffic accidents rose increased by 7.7 percent. That’s a not-so-grand total of 35, 200 fatalities on U.S. roads last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). That number is also up from 2014, which saw 32,675 fatalities. Last year’s total equates roughly 1.12 deaths per 100 miles driven.

 

While these figures include automobile accidents, they also encompass motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians who are struck. Accidents involving bicyclists rose 13 percent, pedestrians, 10 percent, and motorcyclists rose nine percent.

 

NHTSA said nine out of the 10 regions in the country had fatal accident increases. Region 5, which consists of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, saw a staggering 9 percent increase in traffic accidents in 2015.

 

"As the economy has improved and gas prices have fallen, more Americans are driving more miles," NHTSA Administrator Dr. Mark Rosekind said. Because of this, he says that NHTSA is beginning to focus their efforts on "improving human behavior" while simultaneously promoting different technologies that can help eliminate human error, as a factor in traffic accidents. Later this month, Rosekind and NHTSA are expected to release a list of preliminary guidelines for autonomous vehicles, as features like advanced blind spot monitoring and automatic emergency braking become standard equipment on more and more vehicles.

 

This data was released just days after NHTSA announced it was launching an investigation into an accident that resulted in the first fatality in a vehicle operating autonomously. Florida resident Josh Brown was killed in June when his Tesla Model S was operating in it's Autopilot mode. While this feature sounds as though it enables the car to drive itself, it does not make the car completely autonomous.