Jessica Mathews / news@whmi.com


Oakland County roads have topped the safety list for decades now.

The Road Commission for Oakland County (RCOC) reports that once again in 2024, Oakland County saw a substantially lower traffic-fatality rate on its roads than either the state or nation as a whole or than almost any surrounding county.

The county, state, and national traffic-fatality rates were recently released for 2024. For the year, Oakland County’s fatality rate was less than half of either the state or national rate.

A release states “Not only is Oakland County’s traffic-fatality rate lower than the state and national rates, it is also lower than other counties in Southeast Michigan, including Wayne, Macomb, Washtenaw and Genesee counties. Only Livingston County had a lower traffic-fatality rate for 2024”.

Officials noted Oakland County has had the lowest, or among the lowest, traffic-fatality rate in the state nearly every year for the past several decades. In part, it’s said to be the result of the Road Commission making safety its top priority since 1978. Since that time, “the agency has been a national leader in traffic safety and one of the first and most aggressive users of traffic-crash data to drive road-improvement and maintenance decisions”.

For 2024, Oakland’s traffic-fatality rate was 0.51 deaths per 100 million miles of vehicle travel. For the year, the statewide rate was 1.06 fatalities per 100 million miles of vehicle travel and the national rate was 1.20.

RCOC Managing Director Dennis Kolar said “Safety is our number-one priority. While we are always striving to reduce the number of crashes on our roads, and even one fatality is too many, it is still encouraging to see that our roads remain very safe compared to others across the state and nation. That is the result of more than 40 years of using crash data as the number-one factor driving road project selection and design decisions. This has involved a lot of hard work and commitment to safety by everyone at RCOC, but that work has clearly paid off.”

Kolar added that RCOC’s data-driven safety efforts have been successful in part because they remove political considerations from road-improvement decisions. He said “Virtually everything we do is driven by an interest in safety. Whether it is how we select the projects we do each year, how we design those projects, how we prioritize our road maintenance activities, etc. It is all based on crash data and safety analyses and not on political considerations or political influence.”

The release states if Oakland’s roads experienced the same fatality rate as the national rate, approximately 60 more people would die on Oakland roads every year. Kolar said “That’s a huge deal. That’s 60 families every year that do not have to suffer the loss of a loved one.”

Attached are a table and graph showing the 2008-2024 traffic-fatality rates for the Southeast Michigan region, as well as the state as a whole and the nation as a whole, as compiled by the Transportation Improvement Association.