Maryland Wrong-Way Driving Crash: Hundreds Die Every Year In Similar Cases

In an early morning fatal crash Wednesday, which resulted from wrong-way driving (WWD), two people died in Annapolis, Maryland. A wrong-way driver caused the crash that, as investigators said, happened around 2 a.m. EDT on westbound route near Bay Dale Drive.

All the westbound lanes of Route 50 were closed following the accident, reports said.

Although the police had received the information regarding a driver heading eastbound on the westbound lanes of Route 50, when they reached the scene, the crash had already taken place. The drivers of the cars — a man and a woman — from the separate vehicles had died. And there was a third vehicle involved in the crash; the passenger and driver were transported to a nearby hospital, Fox 5 reported.

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"Traffic safety and highway design literature has historically defined a wrong-way driving (WWD) crash as one in which a vehicle traveling in a direction opposing the legal flow of traffic on a high-speed divided highway or access ramp collides with a vehicle traveling on the same roadway in the proper direction," according to the website of Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration.

Around 300 to 400 people are killed by WWD crashes on an average every year. This figure represents approximately 1 percent of the total number of traffic related fatalities which takes place annually, the Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration reported.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) first addressed the issue of wrong-way driving in 1968 while it was investigating a multiple-fatality wrong-way collision near Baker, California. Then, it subsequently conducted two more major investigations of wrong-way collisions, in 1970 and 1988. After investigating these three cases, the NTSB issued 30 recommendations, about 50 percent of which focused on drivers impaired by alcohol and countermeasures for wrong-way drivers, a 2012 report of NTSB reported.

In the recent past, Texas has seen a spike in WWD crashes, reports said. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) was working last year to identify and stop the rising wrong-way driving accidents. The state has been moving up on the list of top states for wrong way crashes, according to kxan.com.

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The TxDOT said that such crashes are more prominent in Austin. Their research found that during 2011, a total of 185 cases of WWD were reported in San Antonio. During that year there were seven fatalities caused by a wrong-way driver. The research also highlighted on the timings in which these kinds of accidents took place, which was between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., the report said.

In 2016, the Arizona Department of Public Safety had received more than 1,600 reports of a wrong-way driver, a report said citing Raul Garcia, public information officer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety. However, Garcia did not have figures from other years to compare the 2016 numbers with.

Out of those 1,600 reports, 27 were instances which included serious injuries or deaths and more than 100 drivers involved in those incidents were arrested on suspicion of impairment.

“A very small percentage of that 1,600 has resulted in a crash, and in many instances, these people reorient themselves or get to where they are going and exit the highway,” Garcia said.