Occupants and Non-occupants

Early morning head-on freeway crash SR51 near Indian School. The driver known only as a 27 y.o. man from Ohio was driving a (new?) Corvette the wrong way. Police think the driver may have been impaired. Really? You don’t say. The name hasn’t been released but expect aggravated assault charges when he’s released from hospital.

Two Tempe officers hurt in wrong-way crash on SR-51 in Phoenix

The two police officers who were injured were released from the hospital after a couple of days, the w-w driver is hospitalized with “non life threatening injuries”. Police have still not revealed the driver’s name and only say that charges, if any, wouldn’t be leveled until he was released.

Occupants and Non-Occupants

The official definition is

Occupant Any Person Who Is In Or Upon A Motor Vehicle In Transport. Includes The Driver, Passengers, And Persons Riding On The Exterior Of A Motor Vehicle.

But NHTSA seems to consistently release stats in three buckets, Occupants, Non-Occupants (so, peds, pedalcyclists, and also other personal mobility devices like scooters, wheelchairs, etc) and Motorcycles.

Eg. NHTSA’s Traffic Safety Facts Annual Reports 2017 (the latest published) breakdown was

  • 24,973 Occupants (67% of total)
  • 5,172 Motorcyclists
  • 6,988 Non-Occupants
  • 37,133 Total

so Occupants were 67% vs. motorcyclists + nonoccupants = 33%.

Statistical Abstract of US 2012 gives years 1975-2009 (see table 1106). Newer numbers could be obtained from NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts series (most recent data year is 2017)

Occupant (percentage of total deaths) reached highs thru the period 1996-2000 of 80%

In summary, over the long arc of time back to 1975 — occupants of MVs accounted for between 67% and 80% of total traffic fatalities… with 67% being now, the lowest in recorded history. These trends are likely to continue (i mean: the 67% figure is likely to continue to decline) as engineering advances increase the safety of enclosed occupants (or at least, increase it faster for those inside a vehicle compared to everybody else outside a vehicle).

This is likely to have increasingly negative effects on driver behavior. Risk compensation, and all that.

Criminal Case

In the criminal case against the wrong-way driver, above, as of early-2020:
The driver, 27-year-old Eldorado Mukaj, cannot be booked into jail because of his injuries from the crash. (still complaining of pain as of sentencing as of Aug 2022).

The case as of early 2021 is beginning to rumble forward, ; it currently shows 5 endangerment (F6), and two aggravated wrong-way DUI (F4):

History: superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/CriminalCourtCases/caseInfo.asp?caseNumber=CR2020-002178

Minutes: courtminutes.maricopa.gov/JONamesearch.asp?casenumber=CR2020002178
(if that doesn't work; open courtminutes.maricopa.gov and search on CR2020002178 )

I would have thought aggravated assault charges would be appropriate? In any event a dangerous F4 has a presumptive 6 year prison sentence; but as I suspected, somehow wrong-way, DUI drivers never seem to actually get convicted of this despite being 1) driving the wrong way, and 2) DUI. Sad. See e.g. the case here where driver plead to a reduced charge.

The outcome, a guilty plea to Agg DUI, as I suspected, resulted in probation (sentencing minute). This is an (obviously) dangerous class 4 felony, and the sentence is Probation. Here is the 5/4/2022 guilty plea.

How is this “not-dangerous”? Driving very drunk. Driving the wrong way on freeway. Injuring two victims. Who were police officers, nonetheless.

(contrast with the jaywalker case Ersula Ore)

4 thoughts on “Occupants and Non-occupants”

  1. https://efficientgov.com/blog/2019/12/27/why-us-cities-are-becoming-more-dangerous-for-cyclists-and-pedestrians/
    Makes similar obvservations, e.g. that
    “(globally) more than half of all traffic deaths are pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists. In the United States, driver (probably actually means both drivers and passengers) fatalities fell from 27,348 in 2006 to 23,611 in 2017, but pedestrian and cyclist fatalities increased from 5,567 to 6,760”

  4. see https://azbikelaw.org/tempe-traffic-collisions/#comment-146445
    for queries to split by particular city…

    This scheme splits out Motorists vs. Nonmotorists, and then Bicyclists can be subtracted to get Peds by themselves; and note that Motorcyclists will be an approximation, but very close. (the fully correct way would be to link the unit table to the person table and look for drivers/passengers whose vehicle bodystyle is a motorcycle. The approximation is that any fatal crash involving any motorcycle is counted as a motorcyclist fatality, so they are slightly overstated)

    SELECT SUM(TotalMotoristsFatalities), SUM(TotalNonMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident  ; 
SELECT SUM(TotalMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident WHERE sF_Motorcycle  ;   ;
SELECT count(*) FROM 2021_person WHERE ePersonType LIKE ('PEDAL%') AND eInjuryStatus='FATAL';

    or another way is to just get everything out of the person table…

    SELECT count(*) FROM 2021_person WHERE ePersonType LIKE ('PEDAL%') AND eInjuryStatus='FATAL';
SELECT count(*) FROM 2021_person WHERE ePersonType LIKE ('PEDES%') AND eInjuryStatus='FATAL';
SELECT count(*) FROM 2021_person WHERE ( ePersonType LIKE ('DRIVER%') OR ePersonType LIKE ('PASS%') ) AND eInjuryStatus='FATAL';
SELECT count(*) FROM 2021_person WHERE ePersonType LIKE ('OTHER%') AND eInjuryStatus='FATAL';

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