We’re once again nearing the end of “the 100 deadliest days.” Used to describe American roads between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the term was coined to describe a period made more dangerous by an influx of teen drivers.

It’s a stretch, now, to assign particular blame to either teenagers or tourists; almost every week seems to be deadlier than the last.

By the time the 100 days commenced on June 1 this year, 58 people had died on Maine roads since Jan. 1, a more than five-fold increase from 10 during the same period in 2021. By Wednesday, Aug. 31, that figure had risen to 116 – its highest by that date in at least five years.

This week marks an alarming end to the 100-day period.

Three motorcycle crashes were reported in as many days – in Raymond, Alfred and Harrison – each resulting in serious injuries. As we reported earlier this month, nearly 6 percent of motorcycle crashes have ended in death so far this year, a rate that already far exceeds any year of the past decade.

A 59-year-old woman was killed in a two-vehicle crash in Turner last Friday; the driver of the other car reportedly fell asleep at the wheel.

On Monday, two people were killed in a crash on what’s regarded as a dangerous stretch of road in Carmel. On the same day in Sanford, two people were seriously injured in a crash at an intersection where another motorist was killed the week prior. A 33-year-old driver was killed in a head-on collision with a pickup truck in Saco on Tuesday. This is not an exhaustive list.

The Bureau of Highway Safety is reportedly doubling down on awareness campaigns in response to the soaring number of accidents and fatalities. “We need people to just slow down,” director Lauren Stewart told WGME. “You know, put away the distractions and just concentrate on the job of driving.”

As people cut cords, use phones and stray from the radio, gone is the one-size-fits-all advertising campaign. Our increasingly fragmented media landscape makes “meeting people where they are” exceedingly challenging and expensive. That shouldn’t stop us from insisting on it.

Faced with an appalling road safety record, droll road signage from the Maine DOT – whether it refers to a “cold suppah being bettah than a hot ticket” or the fact that the Founding Fathers “did not text and drive” – utterly misses the mark. Any hope of getting through to drivers will be reliant on eliciting a reasonable level of fear, which studies have proven to have positive effects on driving behaviors.

As we said in an editorial earlier this month, criminal penalties for motorists who kill pedestrians, right now rare, need to become commonplace.

And enforcement should not stop there. Sobriety checkpoints, properly and regularly conducted, can have a deterrent effect on impaired or reckless driving of all varieties. The state’s prohibition on red-light and speed cameras, preventing remote enforcement, should be reassessed. Structural changes to routes in the form of road markings and speed bumps can work – providing their meaning is communicated to the public.

Maine is comfortably in the top 10 traffic accident-prone states in America; 10.5 percent of Maine drivers have an at-fault accident on their driving record, according to data compiled by an insurance comparison site last week. That’s 19 percent higher than the national average, and the national average leads the world by some distance.

We owe it to ourselves to get off this leaderboard by whatever means available.

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