At the Current Rate of Improvement, Vision Zero Arrives in the 23rd Century

In January 2022, the U.S. Department of Transportation declared that the only acceptable number of roadway deaths is zero.^[1] Four years later, NHTSA released its 2024 FARS final count: 39,254 people dead, at a rate of 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.^[2] Officials called it encouraging, so we ran the projection to see exactly how encouraging it is.

Since USDOT adopted its zero-death target, annual fatalities have fallen from 42,514 in 2022 to 39,254 in 2024, roughly a 4.0% annual decline.^[3] Sustain that pace indefinitely and deaths drop below 1,000 around the year 2110, below 100 around 2163, and below one person somewhere around 2271, which is 245 years from now, spanning approximately eleven generations of Americans who will each be told that zero is the goal while burying their dead at industrial scale.

That projection is wildly optimistic, because the 2022–2024 decline is reversion from the COVID behavioral spike, not a new intervention compounding forever. Between 2014 and 2019, the fatality rate did not decline at all; it rose, from 1.08 to 1.11 per 100 million VMT, while absolute deaths climbed from 32,744 to 36,355.^[3] Project that pre-pandemic trend forward and Vision Zero arrives at a date expressible simply as never, because the line points the wrong direction entirely.

The longest sustained decline in American traffic deaths ran from the late 1980s through 2014, when drunk driving laws, seatbelt mandates, and electronic stability control collectively dragged the annual count from 47,000 to 33,000 over 26 years, producing a 1.4% annual decline rate. Apply that heroic pace to today’s 39,254 and you reach fewer than 100 deaths per year around 2441, which is approximately the era when Star Trek is set. Zero remains a mathematical impossibility under exponential decay: the curve approaches but never touches the axis, which is either a limitation of the model or a commentary on the species.

No federal document specifies when zero should arrive or what consequences follow if the trajectory flatlines. Autonomous vehicles could theoretically produce a step-function decline that breaks the exponential model, since human error factors into roughly 94% of fatal crashes, but Level 4 and 5 systems currently account for less than 0.01% of VMT, and majority autonomous adoption remains decades away.

While you wait for the 23rd century: don’t drive impaired (29% of fatalities), buckle up (47% of deaths involve unbelted occupants), drive a vehicle built after 2012, and avoid rural two-lane roads between midnight and 4 a.m. Vision Zero is a policy aspiration; personal survival is a daily practice.