Displaying the highway death toll on message boards is a common awareness campaign, but new research from the University of Toronto and University of Minnesota shows this tactic actually leads to more crashes. Their study focuses on Texas, where officials chose to display these messages only one week each month. The researchers compared crash data from before the campaign (Jan. 2010 — July 2012) to after it started (Aug. 2012 — Dec. 2017) as well as examined the weekly differences within each month during the campaign. They found:
There were more crashes during the week with fatality messaging compared to weeks without.
— source University of Minnesota | Apr 21, 2022