“Traffic alert.” “Blocking accident.” “Please seek an alternate route.”

If you follow the Grand Traverse 911 page on Facebook, then you’ve probably seen these phrases become an almost daily part of your news feed. There have been so many of these types of bulletins in Traverse City lately that locals have started to wonder whether the area is seeing a historically high number of car crashes in 2024. With peak summer traffic upon us, The Ticker crunched the numbers to find out what’s happening on our local roads – and whether it’s business as usual or a change of trends.

Brandon Brinks is captain of the road patrol division for the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office. While Brinks says he won’t have a great idea of how 2024 measures up to past years until he puts together his end-of-the-year report come January, his feeling is that the numbers “aren’t out of the ordinary” so far.

According to Brinks, Grand Traverse County saw 726 car crashes in the first five months of 2024, including 100 accidents involving injuries and three crash fatalities. Those numbers are actually down slightly from 2023, which saw 764 crashes, 115 car accident injuries, and three fatalities between January 1 and May 31. Brinks says the numbers from both years are relatively in line with the county’s baseline.

“Strictly from a data perspective, I don’t see anything that’s different from any other year,” Brinks says.

In terms of full-year numbers, car crash statistics in Grand Traverse County have mostly held steady across the past decade – and have actually even dipped slightly. Here’s a quick rundown of crash totals and car crash fatalities in Grand Traverse County since 2014, courtesy of Brinks and the sheriff’s office.

2014: 2,764 crashes, 7 fatalities
2015: 2,484 crashes, 10 fatalities
2016: 2,520 crashes, 13 fatalities
2017: 2,635 crashes, 9 fatalities
2018: 2,843 crashes, 4 fatalities
2019: 2,311 crashes, 6 fatalities
2020: 2,077 crashes, 2 fatalities
2021: 1,964 crashes, 14 fatalities
2022: 2,456 crashes, 11 fatalities
2023: 2,075 crashes, 14 fatalities

Accident injury numbers have also remained relatively consistent over the past decade, Brinks says, generally falling in the 250-400 range each year.

Regarding the dip in car accident numbers in 2020 and 2021, Brinks says COVID-19 was the big disruptor, due to how shelter-in-place orders, festival and event cancellations, and work-from-home policies changed the typical traffic patterns.

“In 2020 and 2021, you see those collision numbers drop a little bit, just because the volume of cars on the road was so much less,” he tells The Ticker.

But based on national trends, COVID-19 also changed the way people drive – something that could explain why the past three years have seen more traffic fatalities in Grand Traverse County than the three years that preceded them.

“Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?” the New York Times Magazine asked in an article published earlier this year, noting that “after decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again” in the United States. The piece ties those rising fatality rates to a shift of driving habits that started in 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the pandemic. Looking at an uptick of crashes in Nevada, for instance, the writer of the article, Matthew Shaer, wrote that “drivers were speeding more…and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency”; that “seatbelt use was down” overall; and that “intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.”

Some experts have tied at least some of those driving habit shifts to the fact that, because COVID-19 kept a lot of people at home, roads weren’t as crowded and drivers felt emboldened to drive faster and more recklessly. But one source interviewed in the New York Times Magazine article also suggested that drivers were frustrated with the way the pandemic had upended their lives – frustration that was manifesting in the form of aggressive driving, anger at pedestrians or other motorists, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and more.

Whatever the explanation, Michigan hasn’t been spared from the national trends: Last summer, Michigan State Police reported that traffic fatalities in the state had jumped 15 percent in just four years, from 974 in 2018 to 1,123 in 2022. And while Grand Traverse County’s sample size is small, the county’s uptick in car crash fatalities from the late 2010s to the early 2020s does seem to align with the statewide shift.

For his part, Brinks thinks local fatality numbers may have been even higher over the past few years had it not been for ongoing efforts to convert problematic intersections throughout the region into roundabouts.

“A lot of times, there’s no rhyme or reason to why car crash fatalities occur,” Brinks says. “But when we have intersections like 131 and 186, before there was a roundabout there, you could kind of predict some trouble. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, but you know you’re going to have a fatal crash at an intersection like that, at some point. And by putting in a roundabout there in 2019, we’ve not had a fatal crash there since. I know that people have differing opinions about roundabouts, but they are really good for the safety of our citizens travelling on our roadways. They slow traffic down, they separate traffic, and they really are good for the safety of our roads.”

With more roundabouts and other traffic calming measures underway in and around Traverse City, Brinks is hopeful the area will continue to see fewer crashes – and that fatality numbers will drop back down to single-digits, if not to zero. Regardless of what happens, though, he says the public perception might be that more crashes are happening, if only because law enforcement has gotten better about reporting those collisions out to the world at large.

“Central dispatch has gotten better at getting information out to the public immediately,” Brinks says. “They’re really good now at letting people know ‘This road or intersection is closed down, please take alternate routes.’ In the past, maybe we’d call WTCM or something, to get it on the radio. But we definitely didn’t put stuff out nearly as quickly as we do now. And to the average person, that probably makes it seem like things are worse than they are.”