By Lauren Penington
The Denver Post
DENVER — While Colorado is making progress on road safety, advocates say the state still needs to crack down on seat belt and DUI laws and create more penalties for distracted drivers, according to a safety report card released Thursday.
In a Thursday news conference announcing road safety report cards for all 50 states, Colorado State Patrol Lt. Col. Josh Downing said those changes would help eliminate hundreds of deaths a year on Colorado roads.
Downing said more than 40% of people killed in Colorado car crashes are not wearing their seatbelt.
In total, according to the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety’s report card, Colorado still needs to implement:
- A law requiring motorcycle helmets for all riders;
- Laws regarding when a child can safely graduate from a booster seat and sit in the front seat of a car;
- Laws changing the minimum age to get a learning permit to 16 and a license to 17;
- Requiring 70 hours of supervised driving;
- Prohibiting unsupervised driving for “young drivers” after 8 p.m. and non-familial teen passengers from riding with a teen driver without adult supervision;
- Banning all phone use, including hands-free use, for young drivers;
- Primary enforcement laws requiring seatbelts in the front and back seats. Colorado requires the driver and any front-seat passenger to wear a seatbelt. However, the law is a “secondary enforcement law,” meaning police can only ticket people for violations if the driver was already pulled over for another offense, and it doesn’t apply to backseat passengers.
According to preliminary state data, 716 people died on Colorado’s road in 2023, down 5% from 754 deaths in 2022. Thousands more were injured in crashes.
More than 100 people die every day in car crashes across the country and 6,500 are injured, according to the advocate group’s annual report, putting Colorado just under the average for yearly deaths.
“You never think it will happen to you, until it does,” advocate group president Cathy Chase said in Thursday’s news conference.
Downing said one of Colorado’s biggest problems is protecting vulnerable road users — pedestrians, bikers and law enforcement — from impaired or distracted drivers.
Five state patrol troopers have been killed in recent years while outside of their patrol vehicle and investigating other incidents, Downing said. He added that 2022, the last year with finalized data, also saw record numbers across the country for pedestrian and motorcycle deaths.
“We don’t need investigative police work to figure out why these crashes occur,” he said during Thursday’s news conference. “Impaired driving remains a plague on our roads.”
Advocates said Colorado has adopted seven of the group’s recommended road safety laws, including:
Requiring rear-facing seats for children up to age 2;
- Requiring all-offender ignition interlocks, which prevent people from driving drunk;
- The Open Container law, which prohibits the possession of alcohol bottles or marijuana in a car’s passenger area;
- A new law that expands the ban on cell phone use while driving beyond texting, requiring all Colorado drivers to go completely hands-free starting in January 2025;
- Allowing and using red light cameras and speed cameras, which automatically ticket drivers.
Colorado is one of 35 states that received a yellow “caution” score on their safety report card from the advocate group. A yellow rating means the state still needs improvement in closing safety gaps and adopting road safety laws.
Six states and Washington D.C. received a green rating for their “significant advancement” and nine states received a red score for being “dangerously behind.”
The road safety advocate group focuses on six main areas in its report cards: protections for people in the car, child passenger safety, young drivers, impaired driving, distracted driving and automated enforcement for speeding and red light running.
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