Traffic Safety Programs Can Produce Savings

Employer costs per on-the-job crash, per on-the-job crash injury, and per million vehicle miles of travel enable employers to estimate their injury burden and the potential savings of traffic safety programs. Employers can estimate their cost burden by multiplying the costs in Table 4 by either their total crashes, crash injuries, or millions of vehicle miles of travel.

² Employer health care spending is estimated as the sum of the “Workers’ Compensation Medical” and “Health Insurance & Self-Pay” categories.

On-the-job highway crashes cost employers $22,000 per crash, $97,000 per million vehicle miles of travel (M VMT), and $110,000 per injury. NHTSA reports that safety elements effective in reducing losses associated with motor vehicle crashes include top-level management commit-ment to traffic safety programs, mandatory safety belt policies, alcohol and drug non-use policies, Employee Assistance Pro-grams, and safety outreach, extending safety efforts beyond the company door.

A previous Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS) report includes case studies of the savings from traffic safety programs (Miller, 1992). For every million miles of company travel, a safety program can save the company $50,000.

Employers can also save from programs to prevent off-the-job injury. Family- related interventions can lower health fringe benefit costs. Benefits include a savings of $85 for each child safety seat (Miller et al., 1993) and $30 for every bicycle helmet (Miller et al., 1994).

To produce profits equal to employer costs of motor vehicle-related injury, employers would need $547 billion in sales—over four times the annual growth in the U.S. economy from 1987 to 1994 net of inflation (Figure 2). (This computation assumes that a 10% profit margin is typical of most firms.)

Employer Costs of Crashes by State

Table 5 details employer costs of motor vehicle crash injuries by state. The methods for calculating state costs are documented in the Appendix. Costs per employee vary widely by state. Cost comparisons between states are inadvisable. Critically, our methods ignore differences in non-fatal injury severity between states. This weakness probably produces cost estimates that are too low in rural states relative to urban states, which typically have lower average speeds and consequently less severe injuries. Differences between states also may result from differing completeness of reporting of occupational or crash injuries rather than actual differences in injury rates. Cost differences between states may reflect price and income variations more than differ-ences in safety. Finally, differences in labor force participation rates and family size between states could cause employer costs per employee to vary even if safety levels and prices were equal.

Employer Costs of Crashes by Industry

Employer costs of on-the-job motor vehicle crashes by industry are shown in Table 6. As expected, costs per employee are higher for industries where motor vehicles are used intensively. The highest costs per employee are in agriculture and forestry, land transportation, mining, heavy construction, and automotive sales and repair. Costs were assigned by vehicle type involved in the crash. Heavier vehicles have smaller fatal costs but higher property damage costs. The SOII obtained reports on less than 30% of occupational crash survivors with work loss. We used the reported cases to infer the distribution of unreported cases. Thus, cost variations between industries should be compared cautiously. They may result from differing completeness of reporting.

Conclusions