Fewer dying on Utah roadways, but majority are men who choose not to buckle up

SALT LAKE CITY — It's been 10 years, but Kathi Allred relives her husband's untimely death every single day.

All too often, she can also hear the cries of her then-12-year-old daughter, missing her dad.

"When you wake up to that empty pillow, you miss him every day," she said in a video recording released to the public on Thursday. "You don't ever think you're going to have to face that. Intense loneliness immediately sets in and how do you move on? How do you move on without him?"

Because the largest number of individuals killed on Utah roads in 2011 were men — husbands, fathers and grandfathers — between the ages of 25 and 69, the latest Zero Fatalities promotional material is aimed at getting them to understand what it means to die in a crash and leave family members behind.

"When they're in their vehicle, they are king of the cab. … They do what they want to do," said John Njord, executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation. "When they choose not to buckle themselves up, and they have a fatal crash, there are reverberations that occur with family members and their loved ones that may last an entire lifetime."

In all, 233 individuals died on Utah roads in 2011, which is the lowest number since 1974 and a 20 percent drop since 2006. Fatigue-related fatalities dropped by 30 percent over the same time and distracted driving-related deaths dropped 28 percent. Impaired driving-related fatalities, however, nearly doubled from 2006 to 2011.

Njord said the portion of individuals who died in 2011 due to a lack of seat belt use, 30 percent, is "staggering."

The latest statistics, available online at www.ZeroFatalities.com, reveal that a person is more likely to survive a potentially fatal crash if they use a seat belt, he said. "The odds are in our favor."

Utah has an 89.2 percent seat belt usage rate, yet the 11 percent who do not buckle up accounted for more than 30 percent of the traffic fatalities in 2011.

"If every person buckled up every time, we could have eliminated more than 530 traffic fatalities in the last five years alone," said Utah Highway Patrol Col. Daniel Fuhr. He said even one fatality is too many.

"Our goal is that nobody dies," he said.

During four of nine holiday weekends in 2011 there were no traffic fatalities in Utah. Fuhr said the success is evidence of law enforcement taking it "one day at a time."