Friday, December 12, 2025

CA Leaders Look Away As Road Deaths Skyrocket

By Lynn La, CALMATTERS

Erika Pringle (right) embraces Allison Lyman, whose son died in a collision, during a candlelight vigil at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

Over the past decade, the number of people dying on California’s roads have shot up dramatically. Nearly 40,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been injured.

And California’s leaders have done little about it.

CalMatters investigative reporters Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler have spent the year detailing how the state allows dangerous drivers to stay on the road, with deadly consequences. In the latest installment of their License to Kill series today, they write:

Year after year, officials with the power to do something about it — the governor, legislators, the courts, the Department of Motor Vehicles — have failed to act. 

The silence, in the face of a threat that endangers nearly every Californian, is damning.

Colin Campbell, a writer and director in Los Angeles, lost his two teenage children after a repeat drunk driver slammed into his Prius on the way to the family’s new home in Joshua Tree. He then began advocating for California to join most other states and create a law requiring in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI.

The ACLU opposed the measure, calling it “a form of racialized wealth extraction.” The DMV told lawmakers that it could not “complete the necessary programming” for the law.

So the bill was gutted. California couldn’t do something that nearly three dozen other states could.

• Campbell: “Our lives were destroyed that night. If these people’s children had been killed by a drunk driver, there is no way they would be objecting to this.”

Steve Gordon, whom Gov. Gavin Newsom picked to run the DMV in 2019, won’t talk about the rise in deaths. He has declined or ignored CalMatters requests for an interview.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.