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Traffic Safety: The Safe System Approach in Wisconsin

The Safe System Approach aims to create a transportation system that prevents death and serious injury for all roadway users by focusing on the root causes of crashes. As detailed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Safe System Approach emphasizes that:

  • Humans make mistakes.
  • Humans are vulnerable to injury and death from the energy of a crash.
  • Crashes are preventable.
  • Death and serious injury from a crash are not acceptable.
  • Roadways, vehicles, traffic patterns, and policies should be planned with human error and vulnerability in mind.

Instead of only focusing on crash prevention at the individual level, the Safe System Approach also considers environmental factors that contribute to traffic injury and death. As outlined on the U.S. Department of Transportation website, the Safe System Approach emphasizes that Safer People, Safer Roads, Safer Vehicles, Safer Speeds, and better Post-Crash Care are needed to prevent traffic injuries and death.

To learn more about how we are working to keep Wisconsin roads safe, read the Wisconsin Strategic Highway Safety Plan.

Preventing accidents

Any traffic accident death is preventable. In Wisconsin, accident prevention efforts focus both on reducing behaviors that can cause an accident and changing parts of the environment (like the speed limit) that contribute to accidents.

Individual behaviors, like impaired driving and seatbelt use, play an important role in safe driving, but adults in Wisconsin are less likely to drive sober and wear a seat belt than adults in most neighboring states.

Accident data

According to data from 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey:

  • 2 in every 50 Wisconsin adults have driven after having too much to drink.
  • 1 out of 15 Wisconsin adults sometimes, seldom, or never wears a seatbelt when riding or driving in a car.

Certain communities in Wisconsin experience higher motor vehicle injury and death rates. The rates of motor vehicle hospitalization and death among Black and American Indian or Alaska Native residents are higher than all other racial groups.

Chart showing motor vehicle hospitalizations age-adjusted rate per 100,000 people in Wisconsin from 2019-2023, showing American Indian or Alaska Native at 60.9, Asian or Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian at 21.4, Black at 115.7, White at 37.8 at
Chart showing vehicular fatalities in Wisconsin by age-adjusted rate per 100,000 people from 2019-2023, showing American Indian or Alaska Native at 18.3, Asian or Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian at 4.6, Black at 18.3 and White at 9.4

Source: Wisconsin Hospital Discharge Data, Inpatient Discharges, Office of Health Informatics, Division of Public Health, Wisconsin Department of Health Services and death records for Wisconsin residents, 2019-2023.

Note: There is not a significant difference in motor vehicle hospitalization or death rates by ethnicity. Racial groups are mutually exclusive and include both Hispanic and non-Hispanic people. Multi-racial data is not displayed. For more information about how race and ethnicity are reported on death and hospital records, see Injury Death Data Technical Notes and Injury Emergency Department Visits and Hospitalization Data Technical Notes.

Environmental causes of accidents

Some communities face environmental challenges that can cause traffic injury. For example, a lack of funding in safe sidewalks and paths increases the risk of pedestrian and cyclist injury. Among Black Wisconsin residents, traffic injury hospitalization rates for pedestrians (15.8 per 100,000) and cyclists (2.4 per 100,000) are significantly higher than all other races. Lack of high-quality medical care or insurance coverage may also cause higher traffic injury rates in these communities.

Environmental changes, like those outlined by County Rankings and Roadmaps (including community access to walking and biking routes) can reduce pedestrian and cyclist injury, improve physical health, and even reduce the speed of traffic.

Data notes

Traffic fatality data may vary based on the source due to different reporting requirements and definitions. Unless noted as from another source, death data for traffic safety webpages came from death records of Wisconsin residents whose deaths were motor vehicle traffic injury related.

For this webpage, motor vehicle traffic deaths were included if the deceased was a Wisconsin resident, the accident occurred on a roadway, and the accident involved a motor vehicle. Values may vary slightly from injury death data on the Wisconsin Interactive Statistics on Health as this system uses provisional data rather than the final data included on this webpage.

Hospitalization data on the traffic safety webpages describes non-fatal injury-related hospitalizations of Wisconsin residents based on the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM). The ICD-10-CM is used by health care organizations to code for injuries and illnesses.

These data count inpatient stays and not individual patients. This means that patients transferred between hospitals, readmitted to a hospital for further treatment, or otherwise treated in more than one inpatient stay are counted more than once.

Injury hospitalization data is limited to stays with an ICD-10-CM principal diagnosis code related to an injury. This means that if a patient was admitted for multiple reasons, but the primary reason for admission was not an injury, the hospitalization stay will not be included in this dataset.

Emergency department (ED) data describes injury-related ED visits of Wisconsin residents based on the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM).

The ICD-10-CM is used by health care organizations to code for injuries and illnesses. This data includes injury-related ED visits where the patient was treated and released. Patients transferred to hospitals for inpatient stays or those who died while in the ED are not included.

The Injury ED data subset is limited to visits with an ICD-10-CM diagnosis or external-cause code (e-code) related to injury.

Race data are based on population data from the U.S. Census Bureau and include the following racial categories:

  • American Indian and Alaska Native
  • Asian, Black or African American
  • Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander
  • White
  • "Two or more races."

Rates will not be provided for "two or more races" or "unknown race.”

Due to changes in the reporting form, there was a larger number of missing and inconsistent race information from some facilities in the first quarter of 2018.

Race information for this year should be reviewed with caution (especially when comparing to previous and later years).

Questions

If you have questions about data presented on this page, email the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Division of Public Health Data Resource Center at DHSDPHDataResourceCenter@dhs.wisconsin.gov.

Glossary

 
Last revised April 17, 2025