AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
Thank you very much, Mike. I’m honored to be a part of GHSA’s Annual Meeting and appreciate the invitation to speak to you this morning. Jonathan and Mike, it’s been great to work together with GHSA as a critical partner in our mission to save lives. I’m encouraged to see a full ballroom bright and early this morning to talk about traffic safety.
Before I get started, I’d like to recognize four special individuals who recently announced their retirement. Amy Davey, the administrator of the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety, has served two terms as GHSA’s vice chair. Carol Gould, a highway safety manager at the Colorado Department of Transportation, is a member of GHSA’s Executive Board. Mark Ezzell is the director of North Carolina’s Governor’s Highway Safety Program, and Bridget White is the administrator of the Arkansas Highway Safety Office. All four are retiring soon, and we wish them all the best and thank them for their many years of dedication to public safety.
That commitment to serving the public is something you all share. Whether you work for a state, a city, a safety organization, or a law enforcement agency, you are a part of our shared safety mission. What you do matters because your work saves lives. The decisions you make mean that someone may arrive home safely at the end of the day. You can change lives and save lives – and I can think of no more honorable achievement.
And we’ve seen some positive trends. Our estimate for total 2025 fatalities – about 36,600, was down from 39,000 the year before, and 43,000 at the height of the pandemic.
Our early estimates for the first quarter of 2026 show our trends have continued in the right direction in terms of total fatalities and the fatality rate. An estimated 7,770 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in the first quarter of 2026, a 4.3 percent decline from the same time in 2025. We also saw a drop in the projected fatality rate to 0.99 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, down from 1.05 in the first quarter of 2025. This would be the second lowest first-quarter fatality rate NHTSA has ever recorded if that projection holds.
I firmly believe that it’s important to celebrate successes, and those numbers reflect a lot of work on the federal, state, and local level—and I believe the return of active law enforcement in a number of jurisdictions, combined with safer cars, has had a good bit to do with this.
But we can’t just look at those numbers and think it must be because we’re doing the right things, and that we can coast and expect numbers to keep falling. And the fact remains that tens of thousands of people are still killed on our roads every year, in preventable crashes where impairment, speeding, distraction or lack of seat belt use played a factor.
We need to continually evaluate our data, state by state, community by community, checking what’s working, what’s not working, what new tools are available, what’s changing, and what can we do about it. Our jobs are hard, but there is no greater honor or privilege than being in the business of finding the best ways to save lives. And there is no better time to be in our line of work than today.
The challenges we face on our nation’s roads demand big solutions. And to achieve big solutions, we need big ideas. The status quo won’t help us reach our goals. Countermeasures that work alone won’t reach our goals. We all need to be bold in our thinking, in our programs, and in how we examine the issue of traffic safety. We also need to be bold in changing the way we all work together.
This recognition is the foundation of NHTSA’s Pathway to Safer Streets, our national traffic safety action plan I was proud to announce a few months ago.
Pathways to Safer Streets, or P2SS, is a data-driven national action plan to address the fatality crisis on America’s roads. It is the most extensive and comprehensive traffic safety initiative in our agency’s history. It starts with the conviction that traffic deaths are not inevitable – they are preventable tragedies that arise primarily due to poor choices by road users across our country. Our action plan aligns with our aspiration to make the loss of tens of thousands of lives on our roads every year a thing of the past.
P2SS is our roadmap to reaching our traffic safety destination, and it’s not just for NHTSA. We invite you all to join us on this journey to safer roads. Our initiative has eight pathways, all of which are intersecting pieces of the same system, and each pathway depends on the others to succeed. We are attempting to break down silos across NHTSA and across the broader traffic safety community. And the success or failure of our approach will depend upon all of us.
I’m pleased to share that we’ve made significant progress already on delivering on these initiatives. I’d like to share some of those with you over the next few minutes.
The first pathway and cornerstone of this plan is simple: active re-engagement with law enforcement. No longer will the U.S Department of Transportation or NHTSA shy away from traffic enforcement. Traffic laws exist for a reason, and backing off on enforcement does not work. We fully endorse returning to vigorous, effective traffic enforcement, because identifying and stopping dangerous drivers saves lives. And our laws that prohibit driving impaired, driving distracted, excessive speeding, and failing to wear a seat belt were written for a reason.
The numbers make this fact exceedingly clear. About half of passenger vehicle occupant fatalities chose not to buckle up, while about one-third of fatalities involve an alcohol-impaired driver. We also see that another third involves drivers who choose to speed, and far too many fatalities involve a distracted driver—the data are not sufficient to reliably quantify. An officer patrolling and enforcing traffic laws can stop any one of these drivers before they hurt themselves or someone else on the road.
We thank law enforcement nationwide for stepping up – I see many men and women in the room in uniform today. Thank you. We understand that traffic enforcement can come at great personal risk and appreciate all that you do for your communities. In fact, we’ve launched a new award to recognize excellence in traffic enforcement. We awarded the first ones at Lifesavers earlier this year, and we’ll do the same next year too.
We know that law enforcement agencies do not have unlimited resources and must make strategic decisions on where to focus their efforts. That’s why we are once again fully supporting the Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, or DDACTS, initiative. Crime and traffic violations often happen together, so using data to allocate scarce resources to exactly where and when they’re needed is just common sense.
We have also increased training for state and local prosecutors and judges to ensure that when an officer makes a stop, there are real consequences. Drivers will not change their behavior without meaningful penalties. We’re also continuing our vital partnership with the DOJ Community Oriented Policing Services Office, offering virtual training on everything from a refresher on advanced roadside impaired driving enforcement to drug recognition expert testimony.
And I mentioned thinking big – so we’re putting our money where our mouth is. We recently announced a brand new $20 million grant program to fund development and deployment of cutting-edge traffic safety enforcement innovations. Our new Innovative Traffic Safety Enforcement grant program supports law enforcement agencies by funding projects that develop, test, and validate innovations that combat dangerous driving behaviors. We’re accepting applications now, and we encourage organizations nationwide to submit their proposals.
NHTSA is working across USDOT to ensure strong support for law enforcement, including with our partners at the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And we are asking you, our state and local safety partners and advocates, to join with us in embracing a return to traffic enforcement and those who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. And the risk is very real.
In fact, while line-of-duty fatalities are down 5% year over year, traffic-related fatalities are up 82% thus far this year and make up more than half of officer fatalities. This is dangerous work. We’re proud to support the Below 100 and traffic incident management training programs, but it’s just as important that we recognize the risks our partners necessarily take on as we ask them to do even more.
Impaired driving consistently contributes about 30% of all traffic deaths each year, and it’s one of our top priorities for good reason. We are working to end the era of impaired drivers falling through the cracks of our judicial system.
We’re currently in the midst of our Labor Day holiday Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over high-visibility enforcement campaign, which focuses on one of the leading factors in road fatalities – impairment. Those who watched it may have noticed a bit of a change in messaging with this one.
I was joined on stage with sports and entertainment celebrities, including Coach Urban Meyer and Mark Ingram II, which was a unique experience, and we had a discussion not just about impaired driving, but about decision making, teamwork, responsibility to ourselves and loved ones, and planning ahead. And I love taking this more nuanced approach, because I think it resonates with the target audience and may help getting through defenses. Combining education with enforcement saves lives, and we will continue to invest in our campaigns throughout the year.
NHTSA recently released the Impaired Driving Tracking System Readiness Guide. It’s a step-by-step roadmap to help states link every arrest directly to court outcomes, treatment, and recovery. We think that tracking offenders from the moment of the stop to prosecution to remediation—including mental health treatment— can play a significant role in finally stopping the cycle of recidivism.
But it takes more than just tracking, it takes a justice system willing to stop such destructive behavior—which is why our liaison programs have so much value. If you have judges and prosecutors who plead down impaired driving cases, we have judges and prosecutors who can work with them to educate them on the dangers of impaired driving and likelihood of recidivism. I just met an active judge and judicial outreach liaison from Louisiana yesterday who went so far as to take DRE training—these are the type of people I want fighting in our corner.
Convictions require evidence, and toxicology results are important tools in the courtroom. This is especially critical in cases involving drug-impaired driving. NHTSA expanded our Regional Toxicology Liaison Program to all states last year, offering laboratory support, training, and evaluation tools. One of their priorities includes helping states move beyond alcohol “stop testing” limit thresholds to increase drug prevalence data.
If we’re to expand the available data, we have to increase the collection of samples in the field. NHTSA strongly supports oral fluid testing and just completed a profile of five states’ oral fluid programs. It outlines successes and lessons learned from program development and implementation, and we hope this report will help states considering launching their own programs.
And we continue to study the development of technologies that can passively detect impairment in vehicles, and to develop test devices and test procedures that will be necessary for eventual rulemaking once the technology is ready. Impaired driving, whether under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or multiple substances, is an incredibly complex issue and requires a multifaceted plan of attack. We are firmly committed to supporting this from all angles.
When crashes happen, no matter what the cause, time is of the essence. Between 2019 and 2023, 43% of those killed on our highways were alive when first responders arrived at the scene, which demonstrates the enormous potential here to improve survivability.
Catastrophic blood loss is the leading cause of death from injury – we know we need blood, not just saline, to move oxygen to our organs – and we can give these patients a real, fighting chance.
Prehospital blood programs allow EMS agencies to start replenishing a patient’s lost blood before reaching the hospital. And there is an incredibly rich target population. In fact, we just released new data from the National EMS Information System showing that 32,992 crash patients in 2025 met the criteria for prehospital blood transfusion. Research shows this innovation can reduce a severely bleeding person’s risk of dying by 37%. This is an enormous opportunity to save lives, and we are working urgently to establish more programs across the country.
Since we unveiled the P2SS in April, more than 50 EMS agencies have launched new prehospital blood programs, bringing the total to more than 430, including a drone-based blood delivery program just announced in August. With 15,000 EMS agencies nationwide, we are just getting started.
NHTSA is all-in on prehospital blood. I’m spreading the word about it at every event and to every group that I can, because the lifesaving potential is incredible. It could mean the difference between life and death for someone in your community, so we encourage you to take a close look and see how you can support launching these programs in your area.
Doing so will require building partnerships and bringing new stakeholders to the table. That means connecting EMS programs with city councils, local blood banks, health departments, and more. Some of these may be organizations you haven’t interacted with much, if at all, in the traffic safety space.
We understand there can be challenges for the SHSOs in relation to prehospital blood given the need for data, and legal requirements surrounding proportionality, and we want to do everything we can to support you and facilitate these programs.
But big initiatives need broad coalitions to succeed, and that applies to so many safety issues in our communities.
NHTSA embraces this philosophy – we want to work with everyone who is interested in saving lives on our roads. More partners and more ideas make us all stronger and more effective.
Our P2SS established a National Partnership Network, designed to focus our efforts on building, incorporating and supporting key stakeholders as we work toward our common goals. We will expand the reach of our safety campaigns to reach people where they live, work, and play. We also want to include third-party organizations, including some of the safety groups in this very room, to amplify our messages and spread our reach.
So far, we’ve developed vehicle safety resources for personnel at military bases and visitors at national parks and federal buildings. The information is simple, effective, and educates recipients on safer driving behaviors. It’s a small step that can help prevent big tragedies.
One major priority moving forward is our tribal safety support plan to create a NHTSA-wide approach to supporting tribal communities with safety programs and data collection. Our goal is to foster fruitful, long-lasting partnerships between tribal nations, NHTSA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and state highway safety offices.
SHSOs and states as a whole are vital partners – we cannot save lives without you. We envision you playing a major role in our National Partnership Network. We hope to help connect you with many new partners, including employers and businesses, tribes, military bases, other agencies, and more to help you further enhance your programs.
From my time at Apple, I’ve learned that maximizing the chances of those encounters that might generate a conversation and creative spark is incredibly important to innovation. But here, in our line of work, that creative spark can generate programs that may save an untold number of lives. We are here to provide the support, the data, and the introductions you need to save lives.
We know there’s more we can do to build our relationships with state highway safety offices, and there’s a pathway in P2SS focused on doing just that. We’ve launched two new webinar series to identify and share your great work so you can benefit from each other’s expertise.
As a data-driven organization, we’re always looking for new ways to harness data to advance safety. We conducted 12 data deep dives, providing SHSOs with powerful dashboards that pull from crash, Census, roadway, and EMS data. These deep dives can help states identify navigation points as they develop their roadmaps to deploy scarce resources.
We are expanding these resources to all 57 states and jurisdictions, and I encourage everyone to take advantage of this incredible insight.
In fact, our regional operations team recently used these tools to provide in-depth problem identification training specifically for our tribal grantees, helping tribes identify and utilize the data they need to effectively leverage the right tools and resources necessary to succeed.
We’re also excited about a new way to identify crash risk at the road segment level. We’ve worked with data from Virginia’s electronic data transfer feed to create an interactive mapping tool that more accurately quantifies crash risk by road segments, based on robust statistical metrics. And not just based upon frequency of occurrence but controlling for traffic patterns and seasonal changes.
For states with this degree of data quality and sharing with NHTSA, this will allow state and local road safety leaders to easily drill down to identify areas in need of attention. While the tool is a prototype right now, we’d like to eventually apply the methodology to other states as well. We thank Virginia for allowing us to develop this prototype using its crash data, and if you’re interested in learning more and seeing a demo, please let us know.
We are also currently developing our state program hub, a centralized, user-friendly platform that we believe will revolutionize how states access and use data. This isn’t just a database; it’s an automation tool that can generate evidence-based recommendations for your programs using the latest analytic techniques.
Innovation shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. We now have the Promising Practices Repository, a centralized collection of state projects turned into actionable strategies. These tips are designed to help states include new projects in their safety programs, and we’re seeing some cool stuff out there. Please let us know if you have ideas you’d like to explore helping us highlight your great work for your colleagues to learn from, just as you’ve learned from them.
Before I close, I want to say a few words to our state partners in the room about those triennial plans and grant applications. I mentioned this yesterday during the town hall with state highway safety directors, but it’s so important that I’m going to repeat it here.
NHTSA is thinking big and thinking bold. Any idea is welcome if it can save a life. Just as we are breaking down silos and embracing new ways of working, we expect the same from you. We want to see fresh concepts, creative approaches, and innovative programs.
In that past, we’ve seen too many highway safety plans that are a repeat of previous plans, sometimes even word for word. We are looking for more than a cut-and-paste of past proposals. With tens of thousands of people dying each year on our nation’s roads, yesterday’s approaches won’t deliver the meaningful changes we need today.
We’ve heard from you and GHSA about various reporting burdens that impeded your work, and we’ve removed those to free you up to focus on the big ideas. With that flexibility, we’re looking for you to deliver tangible results.
And while we’ve removed duplicative requirements, we’ve kept those that track how money is being spent. NHTSA is accountable to the Secretary, Congress, the White House, and, most importantly, to the taxpayer for every dollar we spend, and we all owe it to the American people to be good stewards of their hard-earned money. Our spending, including highway safety grants, must deliver measurable returns.
I’ve heard that there’s some hesitation or concern among the states about proposing new programs or ideas. Perhaps that’s from past experience with a NHTSA that may not have embraced new approaches, but that’s the opposite of what I want to hear! I am here to personally say – do not be afraid. No idea is too big or too small if it can save lives. We may not be able to do everything we want, but we will engage in a respectful discussion, hear you out, and if it’s promising we’ll work with you.
This administration is embracing innovation, and we want you to do the same. I want to hear your great ideas, even the ones that seem unconventional or completely out of left field. Let’s team up to turn those big, bold ideas into lifesaving actions across the country.
After all, the lives of everyone on our roads depends on us. What we do, day in and day out, may determine whether someone arrives home at the end of the day. Or if their life is cut short by a drunk driver, or a speeding driver, or a distracted driver.
I urge you to join us in recommitting to what works. Traffic enforcement works. Tackling the risky driving behaviors that contribute to so many deaths works. Building new partnerships works.
And all of this requires thinking big and bold. I challenge you all to think critically about the issues in your community and be the changemaker we need. Embrace the opportunity in front of you.
As I said at the beginning, you have the power to change and save lives. Be the traffic safety hero we need and help us reach that day when we can celebrate no more traffic deaths on America’s roads.
I know you can do it – I know WE can do it. Together.
Thank you very much for spending time with us today.