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We've come a long way, but (1) pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% over the last 10 years and (2) this feeds a cycle of driving is safer, encouraging more driving, and more miles means more deaths and injuries.
The drop since the late ‘80s has been modest and some of that drop may be due to better traffic engineering, seat belt laws, & less DUI.
I’d like to know what % of a car’s cost today is due to safety features that weren’t on 1988 cars so we could calculate a cost/benefit.
Now do the same graph but for cycling... no one wants to talk about how insanely dangerous cycling/ebikes/scooters are...
They used to be safer in 2010s, in 2020s in the epoch of trumpism this is the new normal. Particularly egregious are parents at elementary school drop-off in these.
It’s easy to forget how much safer cars have gotten over time, especially when looking at the number of road deaths today. But this graph shows something important: the chances of dying in a car accident, per 100 million miles driven, have dropped a lot. This is true even though
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Per vehicle miles travelled is not relevant. Fatalities per 100 people is the only thing that matters.
Still not a bad idea to see why it seems to be blipping up and high vs other countries
Ehhh, it’s kinda engineering brain. It’s “per mile driven” which makes highways seem much safer than they are.
We’re dying more but driving way more, so deaths per mile has fallen as deaths per 1000 has risen. Not clear to me that we made the right trade off…
Well, medicinenin general has improved to where previously fatal injuries become lifelong impairments. Seen quite regularly in the military. I wonder how much of this follows that trend.
It’s a little misleading as it is per miles driven and not per capita. A lot of fatalities come from short haul trips. That graph just points out we have more long haul trips since the interstate
Compare the graphs to our peer and oecd countries…yes it used to be more dangerous here, but it was a hell of a lot more dangerous there and now it’s way more dangerous here than there
Is this all road traffic incidents? US numbers of deaths and injuries are massively higher than the rest of the first world. It’s very dangerous to be cycling or walking near the ever expanding population of traffic in this country.
It’s still ridiculous compared to the rest of highly developed economies
I've always loved looking at the history of cars, partly for the performance but also as an indicator of what the market thought was the price point of safety available to the public.
Volvo has played an outsized role in this and they don't get nearly enough credit
We literally had suicide seats in the back of cars. I went to a friend's birthday party in the city and his mom drove us all in her station wagon, and I sat in the trunk on a fold out seat. Yes! In the trunk! If the car got rear-ended, I was done.
Noah, I don't think this factors in the fact that North American infrastructure is built to force us to drive a lot. And we've been driving more and more.
While reducing deaths per mile driven is great, I think we should also be aiming for reducing the need to drive overall.
Also ppl talk about the size of cars vs pedestrians (and this *is* an issue), but my hunch is turning as many intersections into roundabouts as possible would cut down on pedestrian deaths significantly, and might be politically easier than people giving up their beloved SUV's
3.5 million American car fatalities since the Model T vs about 1 million in all wars since 1775.
This was actually brought up in Goldfinger in 1964:
Bond- You'll kill 60,000 people uselessly.
Goldfinger- American motorists kill that many every two years.
seat belts, better brakes, bodies and chassis designed to crumple and absorb energy of collision, more safety equipment.
better engineering.
distracted, overly aggressive drivers are the problem now.
How would we distinguish that interpretation of the graph from explanations based on the idea that the environment in which cars drove became safer or "of the miles cars drive, far more of them are relatively safe miles to drive"?
Most of the data is not comparing apples to apples. Probably should start around the 60s or 70s for a decent comparison. So it roughly has been cut in half, which is good, however we're definitely dealing with diminishing returns on the money spent for safety.
If highway deaths were an effective way to convince people not to drive, I feel a lot fewer people would have driven when it was 8 times as dangerous.
Look, I know we lost 46,000+ people in vehicle fatalities this year. BUT statistically on a per vehicle miles basis it’s gotten much better. Can we end all this shouting now?
That's a stat that can mislead the same way that per capita murder rates suggest Manhattan is a low crime geographic area when it's clearly not
(Btw There were 47k deaths in 1920 vs 41k in 2023 reflecting seat belt/air bags mostly)
Copy paste for child mortality, illiteracy, indoor air pollution, aircraft fatalities, vaccine preventable childhood disease, extreme poverty, racism, energy poverty and much more.
Why is per miles traveled useful? Shouldn’t it be overall populace? More use of vehicles shouldn’t scale linearly.
Poor conclusion from poorly designed data, Noah. Tsk tsk
It makes it look like there are major improvements to safety in the first ~20 yrs instead of just more cars and roads being built causing more people to drive lowering the total fatality/x miles.