Finally, a correlation between high gas prices and good news: traffic death tolls could reach the lowest since John F. Kennedy occupied the White House.

That’s the premise posed by research at the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan. According to The Associated Press, the one-year study found that “as gas prices rose, driving and fatalities declined.”

Study author Professor Michael Sivak says it’s more than just the obvious: high gas prices means more people are driving less.

He believes some of our baggage of bad driving habits is being left behind as we are more conscious not just of how far we drive, but how we drive.

Perhaps that’s true. We’ve heard from several sources that maintaining an even speed improves gas mileage, as does keeping tires properly inflated. And if we’re slowing down (and on safely and properly inflated tires), we’re apparently paying more attention to other drivers and thus to our own driving.

Take that a little further and imagine that we’re combining our trips around town and thus not spending every weeknight after work running errands or tying up our weekends (and traffic) running around town. We might even be feeling a little less stressed when we’re not strapped in and spending time in traffic we could be spending with family, friends or a good book we’re been meaning all summer to read.

If the trends for the first few months of the year continue, Sivak said, the nation could see annual traffic deaths drop below 37,000 for the first time since 1961.

Sure, we know it’s probably because we’re driving less for economical reasons that constitutes the main reason behind improvements on our roads.

But wouldn’t it be easy to keep up the current pace of travel (or slow it down, if you want to be literal), even as the price of gas continues to fall?

Conservation of what’s in our wallets could even lead to improving the mindset about conservation in other ways as well: using less water, recycling and other simple acts that will help not just our checkbooks, but our communities, too.