Introduction

The United States is infamous for its lack of public transportation, a shortfall that I believe poses a threat to the harmonious success of our nation in the future. As a whole, America lags painfully behind other developed nations in terms of its passenger rail system, which, if implemented correctly, could connect the entire country in a more environmentally and socially conscious way than our modern interstate infrastructure.

North Carolina was ranked by the U.S. News & World Report as 29 in the country for public transit, placing it roughly in the middle of all 50 states. However, this is even less impressive given the state is crisscrossed by Amtrak’s Piedmont, Crescent, Carolinian, Silver Star and Palmetto routes, suggesting North Carolinians have access to a “better” passenger rail system than a large chunk of other states.



A common argument made by supporters of train travel is that the more people travel by train, the less traffic accidents there will be on the road. Road crashes are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people under the age of 54, according to the Association for Safe International Road Travel. This report will investigate my hypothesis that, of all 100 North Carolina counties, those that lie along an Amtrak route will have less traffic fatalities and alcohol related accidents on average than those with no access to a passenger rail system.


Amtrak Ridership

Before we begin, we must load our libraries.


library(tidyverse) 
library(readxl)


First, let’s look at the rates of Amtrak ridership compared to automobile registration. The only data I was able to find for this analysis was national Amtrak ridership and North Carolina automobile and truck registration from 1991 to 2012, so I placed these on a dual axis map to better compare trends. Surprisingly, the rate at which Americans rode Amtrak trains and North Carolinians registered vehicles increased at a similar pace, though the slope of vehicle registration was more consistent.



Seeing the rise in Amtrak ridership, I feel it is appropriate to hypothesize that counties with access to passenger rail will see less traffic fatalities.


Traffic Accident Fatalities

Now we can look at traffic fatalities per county. To do this, I created a visualization mapping the total number of traffic accident fatalities in each North Carolina county for every year since 1970.



I also created this incredibly chaotic line graph with the same data.



I included this line graph because, for our purposes, we only need to look at the top of the graph to see that the counties with the most number of fatalities are Mecklenburg, Wake and Guilford, which correspond to the counties with the highest populations overall. We can confirm this by looking at a list of the highest number of fatalities in a given year.


## # A tibble: 10 × 5
##    `Area Name`  Year Variable                    Value  rank
##    <chr>       <dbl> <chr>                       <dbl> <int>
##  1 Mecklenburg  2020 Traffic Accident Fatalities   120     1
##  2 Mecklenburg  2018 Traffic Accident Fatalities   107     2
##  3 Mecklenburg  2017 Traffic Accident Fatalities   104     3
##  4 Wake         1998 Traffic Accident Fatalities    96     4
##  5 Mecklenburg  1971 Traffic Accident Fatalities    95     5
##  6 Mecklenburg  2016 Traffic Accident Fatalities    93     6
##  7 Mecklenburg  2007 Traffic Accident Fatalities    92     7
##  8 Mecklenburg  2000 Traffic Accident Fatalities    90     8
##  9 Mecklenburg  2019 Traffic Accident Fatalities    90     9
## 10 Mecklenburg  1981 Traffic Accident Fatalities    89    10


This means we have to take into account each county’s population to get an accurate understanding of how their data compares to other countries. Unfortunately, I was unable to find accurate population reports since 1970. So to make things easier, I decided to look at a single year. I chose data from 2019 out of concern that 2020 data may be misleading due to the coronavirus pandemic. To get more accurate data, I divided each county’s total population by 1,000, then divided that number by the number of fatalities to get the number of fatalities per 1,000 people.

I then created a map of each North Carolina county shaded by the number of traffic accident fatalities per 1,000 people. I overlapped this with North Carolina’s Amtrak routes, shown in orange.



This reveals no major trends, but it is interesting that there are no dark shaded counties along Amtrak routes.

To investigate further, we can compare the number of fatalities in the counties with those most serviced by Amtrak. From the prior map, we can see which counties are traversed by an Amtrak line. And from Amtrak’s own data, I found that the counties with residents that use Amtrak the most frequently are



When this data is visualized with a scatter plot, an interesting trend emerges.



As shown by the best fit line, counties with more active Amtrak lines seem to see more traffic accident fatalities on average.


Conclusion

I was unable to sufficiently prove my original hypothesis that residents within counties accessible by Amtrak passenger rails suffer less traffic fatalities and alcohol related accidents on average than those in counties with no access. In maps displaying both accident fatalities and drunk driving accidents per 1,000 residents, the areas with the highest concentration of these events lie outside of areas serviced by Amtrak. However, when comparing counties that are served by Amtrak, there seems to be an inverse correlation in which the more residents that use the train, the more traffic fatalities and drunk driving accidents occur.

Of course, this perceived correlation does not imply that the existence of Amtrak trains causes those incidents to occur, and I’m sure the rate at which traffic fatalities and alcohol related accidents occur is influenced by more environmental factors not considered in this report. I also do not believe my failure to prove my hypothesis suggests that public transportation cannot improve these rates. Instead, I think this shows how ineffective America’s public rail system is at serving modern commutes.

Sources


Images

Train