WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of people dying on the nation's roads has fallen to its lowest level in six decades, helped by a combination of seat belts, safer cars and tougher enforcement of drunken driving laws.
The Transportation Department said late Wednesday that traffic deaths fell 9.7 percent in 2009 to 33,808, the lowest number since 1950. In 2008, an estimated 37,423 people died on the highways.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the annual report "shows that America's roads are the safest they've ever been. But they must be safer. And we will not rest until they are."
Forty-one states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico saw reductions in highway fatalities, led by Florida with 422 fewer deaths and Texas, down 405.
The rate of deaths per 100 million miles traveled also dropped to a record low. It fell to 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles in 2009, compared with 1.26 the year before.
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What a bunch of Nazi's. ONE death PER ONE HUNDRED MILLION MILES DRIVEN ---thats right, per 100 MILLION driven miles!!--- and they "won't rest until they're safer"???! That means the entire population of the USA could drive from here to the sun (and millions of miles further) and ONE PERSON would be killed on the trip. AND someone in the government thinks thats not quite good enough?? I have a sinking feeling that we are going to be "served and protected" on a scale even greater than ever before. One can already hear these Orwellian, Nazi, pestiferous public MASTERS saying "I don't care if even ONE person dies on our highways, we will not stop surveillance, monitoring, inspecting, use of Nazi "checkpoints", ticketing, fining, shooting, chasing, searching, and confiscating, until we have reached ZERO!!!!!!" (said with a strong German accent) Then, of course, we will start finding OTHER reasons to do all the above, because hey---it's where the money is at and how would we keep our jobs if we didn't keep the hammer down on all you peasants??
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