The New, Very Visible Way Vermont Is Fighting Road Deaths

Every Wednesday for the rest of 2016, the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) will update the body count. As of April 6, the state had 13 traffic fatalities in 2016, up from five in all of last year. In eight of those incidents, the VTrans chief engineer Kevin Marshia says, the deceased weren’t wearing seat belts. The agency is hoping that by publicly posting the number of highway deaths each week, more people might be frightened into buckling up—or putting down the cellphone, or backing away from the car while drunk, or traveling closer to the speed limit.

So every week, the state’s electronic message boards will carry the death count. This is not a new idea: Marshia says Vermont was specifically influenced by consistently updated traffic fatality signs in Tennessee and Colorado, but similar tactics have been used in many, many other states, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and Utah included. (Utah’s signs reported on the number of days the state had gone without a fatality. “We wanted to actually have some positive news to report,” a Utah DOT spokesman said in 2014.)