Each Memorial Day, Utahns hear a familiar warning about the “100 Deadliest Days,” the stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day when roadway deaths historically spike.

The advice rarely changes: Buckle up, slow down, drive sober. But it describes a problem that has quietly outgrown it. Headline numbers are improving, even as behavior behind the wheel gets worse. The space between those two truths is exactly where Utah families are getting hurt.

As CEO and chief litigation officer at Feller & Wendt, a Utah personal injury law firm, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating consequences of serious traffic crashes. And, while some statewide trends are moving the right way, Utah’s next challenge is clear: Stop celebrating the average and start protecting the outliers — the teenager, the rider, the family whose summer trip intersects with someone else’s impatience.

Utah recorded 264 traffic deaths in 2025, down from 277 the year before and the lowest total since 2019. Summer fatalities fell roughly 18%, UDOT reports, and the total number of summer crashes hit a 10-year low.

Yet inside that good news sit figures that should stop us cold. Teen fatalities nearly doubled — from 18 in 2024 to 31 in 2025. Motorcyclist deaths rose 32%. And May 2025 was the deadliest single month of the year, with 37 lives lost.

The statewide curve is bending down while specific groups of Utahns die at higher rates.

National data is blunt about why summer is so dangerous for young drivers: Distraction accounts for a majority of teen crashes, teens are roughly three times as likely as older drivers to crash per mile driven and they are about 20% more likely to be in a fatal crash during the 100 Deadliest Days than the rest of the year.

Distraction is the quiet epidemic at every age — Utah logged more than 27,000 distracted-driving crashes over a recent four-year window.

The state reached 3.55 million residents in 2025, with hundreds of thousands more projected along the Wasatch Front. More people means more vehicles, more miles and more conflict points. Tourism also brings unfamiliar drivers on demanding roads like US-6 through Spanish Fork Canyon where every mistake carries a higher cost.

Growth and tourism do not cause bad driving; they multiply its consequences.

The Legislature has responded. In 2025, Utah strengthened Utah Code § 41-6a-1716 into a near-total handheld ban, enforceable as a primary offense. An officer can stop a driver for holding a phone, nothing more.

In 2024, lawmakers enacted a road-rage statute allowing vehicle forfeiture and steep penalties for aggravated drivers.

These are sensible laws. But laws change consequences after the fact; they do not change the culture that normalized the conduct in the first place.

In my practice, the hardest conversations happen after the crash, when families discover what the law actually does — and does not — provide. The single most important thing to understand is that the law does not treat all bad driving the same. It sorts conduct onto a ladder, and where a case lands determines what a family can recover.

Under Utah Code § 78B-8-201, punitive damages — the law’s tool for punishing and deterring egregious conduct — require clear and convincing evidence of willful, malicious or knowingly reckless disregard for others. A momentary lapse, even a tragic one, rarely qualifies. The Utah Supreme Court drew that line decades ago in Miskin v. Carter, 761 P.2d 1378 (Utah 1988), holding that intoxication plus simple negligence, without more, will not by itself support punitive damages. The conduct must be genuinely aggravated.

And even egregious conduct does not yield limitless accountability. Utah’s most famous driving case, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408 (2003) — which began with a reckless pass on a two-lane highway in Cache County — produced a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Due Process Clause limits punitive awards, observing that few exceeding a single-digit ratio to compensatory damages will survive review. The lesson families absorb the hard way is that the system measures conduct precisely, and the time to influence that measurement is before the keys turn, not after.

The path forward is not mysterious.

Treat the new handheld law as a floor, not a ceiling: phones go in the glovebox, not the cupholder.

Make teen driving a sustained parental project — not a one-time signature on a license form — because teens are 9% of licensed Utah drivers but are involved in 21% of crashes.

Give motorcyclists room, and assume you do not see them.

And as our cities densify, let UDOT and local leaders keep pairing growth with engineering — protected intersections, sightline improvements and corridor safety on the rural highways tourists overwhelm each summer.

Fewer deaths is not the same as safe. This summer, the most honest thing we can say is that the work is succeeding and unfinished at once — and that the difference will be decided one driver, one choice, at a time.

Matthew R. Feller is co-founding partner and Chief Litigation Officer of Feller & Wendt, a plaintiff-side personal injury firm serving Utah, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico and Washington. The views expressed are his own.

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