One of the casualties of this year’s failing discussions about paying for transportation is the level of safety for those driving in Colorado.

Colorado Department of Transportation executive director Shailen Bhatt never fails to mention it in speeches urging legislators to find solutions. Colorado traffic fatalities have surged 24 percent in two years to 605 last year.

That’s the equivalent of a 747 jumbo jet crashing in Colorado every single year.

If the legislature fails to find money in the state budget or work up the political will to ask voters for a tax increase, that plane will keep on crashing.

In most of those cases, it’s human error on overcrowded interstates and rural routes.

This week the Senate Finance Committee killed House Bill 1242 to ask voters to approve a 0.50 percent sales tax to put billions of dollars into widening interstates, fixing up neglected roads and bridges, supporting more transit and give money to local communities for transportation.

Some Republicans didn’t like the tax hike, so they’re offering a bill to take about $300 million out of the existing state budget with no tax hike. So far that’s been a non-starter for the House Democratic majority.

The online insurance marketplace EverQuote is out with its 2017 Safe Driving Report, which shows Colorado drivers are actually slightly safer behind the wheel that the national average.

Colorado scored an overall 81, while the national average is 79.

The report suggests Coloradans are:

The data comes from EverQuote’s EverDrive app that recorded more than 2.7 million trips covering 230 million miles. Shocker — the worst drivers are in the Northeast, where New Englanders drive too fast and talk on their phones too much behind the wheel.

Drivers in the West and Midwest tend to have more respect for the rules of the road, the report suggests.

In the West, Colorado’s score of 81 measures against 80 in New Mexico, 83 in Utah and Nebraska, 85 for Kansas and a whopping 89 for Wyoming, where the wind blows faster than most people drive.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported in November that Colorado had 10 traffic deaths for every 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to the national average of 10.9.