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While Americans may be concerned with safety in air travel, the real danger, as we all pretty much know but forget regularly, is motor vehicles. Somehow our brains are able to conveniently parse and suppress the fact that our chances of dying behind the wheel (or even just in the passenger seat) of a car are around 1 in 100 — compare that to your 1 in 52.6 million odds of being killed on a single airliner trip.
So just how does the U.S. compare with the rest of the world when it comes to traffic-related deaths? This amazing infographic offers an impressive amount of information on international motor vehicle deaths, including how traffic fatalities play out among richer and poorer countries. Right now, road accidents are the ninth leading cause of death in the world — by 2030, they’re projected to be the fifth. Still not sold on public transit?
Image: NGHealthCareEurope
March 11th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
The death rate is very high, but certainly not 1 in 100 for each trip — otherwise, we’d all be dead within a week or two! The rate of 10 deaths per 100,000 persons per year translates into a death rate in the order of magnitude of 1 in 100 over the course of a lifetime.
See also http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized
Obviously, that rate generally increases if you drive more miles or live in a suburb or rural area (due to higher traffic speeds on roads in those areas), and decreases significantly if you live within a city.
Given the available statistics, I’m guessing that the average person reading this article has close to a 1 in 4000 chance of dying this year in a car crash, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying in a car crash over the course of their lifetime.
March 11th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Something seems very off about this infographic. China is a “middle-income” country, but all of Europe is “low-income”?
March 11th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Interesting that the Americas and Africa had the same number of deaths…
Very powerful graphic none the less.
March 11th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
1 in 50! That is nowhere near correct! At least my personal experience must be way out of wack then as I do not personally know a single person who has died in a car wreck or lost any family member to a car wreck. Auto safety has advanced to the point where individual car fatalities make the news — which is hardly indicative of something that is extremely common. Put it this way: you don’t hear of individual’s cancer deaths making the news.
March 11th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
It would be interesting to dig into how the built environment factors into the number of fatalities.
From Wolfram Alpha:
road traffic accidents
—————-
England: cause of death probability | 1 in 155 ~~ 0.64%
Holland: cause of death probability | 1 in 135 ~~ 0.74%
Denmark: cause of death probability | 1 in 124 ~~ 0.81%
Germany: cause of death probability | 1 in 115 ~~ 0.87%
Italy: cause of death probability | 1 in 75 ~~ 1.3%
France: cause of death probability | 1 in 60 ~~ 1.7%
Spain: cause of death probability | 1 in 55 ~~ 1.8%
US: cause of death probability | 1 in 54 ~~ 1.9%
March 11th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Eric, just because you didn’t personally know someone that died in a car crash doesn’t mean the statistic is wrong. I have known a few. My old next door neighbor died in a car accident. She was 18. Recently a girl got killed a block from my house when she was hit by a drunk driver.
As for your local news coverage, have you ever heard the expression “If it bleeds it leads”?
March 11th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
~37K deaths in 2008 (excludes pedestrians) and ~300 million people in the States. 1 in 8,000 odds per year times 80 years = 1 in 100 odds for your lifetime. You’re lucky if you don’t know someone who has died in a car accident.
This infographic is a bit misleading because it doesn’t do much to tell me about fatality rates, per mile or per population. It mostly just tells me that Americans drive a lot.
FWIW, this is around twice the number of deaths from murders. Gun control activists should take transit to their next rally!
March 11th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Right, you can’t base it on personal experience, but that’s still a data point. The Reason Mag link back of the envelope’s it to a 1 out of 83 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the U.S. Higher than I would have thought. I suppose it’s less if you don’t drink and drive, though you can’t account for the ‘other guy’s’ drinking and driving. The rate is probably also higher for younger drivers than older ones, judging from what happens to one’s car insurance rates over time.
March 11th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Reason is wrong, and Wolfram is right.
Here’s why: if population were stable, then annual death rate times life expectancy would be a good estimate for prevalence. The problem is, population isn’t stable. In a geography with growing population, the death rate will be lower than population divided by life expectancy; this is because children die less often than old people.
Let’s follow through with the Reason methodology. Worldwide, the death rate is 8.5/1000, and life expectancy is 67. If you take all causes of death together, and multiply by life expectancy, and you’ll only get a total rate of 570/1000. Obviously, all causes of death should add up to 1000/1000. By Reason’s logic, 43% of the world’s population does not die. (That might explain why so many libertarians are transhumanists…)
It’s the fact of population growth that requires you to do more than just multiply current-year deaths by life expectancy. Indeed, the WHO reports that worldwide, traffic accidents account for 2.1% of all deaths. If you just try to follow Reason’s methodology, then the number is lower, just 1.2% - you can get it either by multiplying 1.2 million annual deaths by 67 years of life and dividing by 6.7 billion people, or by multiplying 2.1% by 0.57.
If you want to do this in the US, the death rate is 8.2-8.4, and life expectancy is 78. These multiply to 650/1000. So your back-of-the-envelope calculation has to be divided by 0.647 to get the correct number. Now, 1/(83*0.65) = 1/54. In other words, Wolfram is correct to within measurement error.
Now do you understand why I’m so skeptical of anything that comes out of Reason?
March 11th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
“1 in 50 chance of dying in a car crash over the course of their lifetime.”
As a cyclist who doesn’t drive, I have the same chance of being killed by “a motorist” as he does of being killed by “one of his own kind.”
That is a risk that I am NOT willing to take. If motorists are killing one another, that’s one thing. But for non-motorists to be killed by these car-people is NOT fair.
True freedom/equality/democracy means that you don’t have to live in fear of being killed by other people’s toys.
March 11th, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Reason stands for personal liberty and for not getting caught up in the media-driven frenzy du jour leading to new laws restricting liberty. An outfit like that is inherently the least dangerous thing around.
March 11th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Not mentioned that injury and death in the developing world is generally recognized as being largely under-reported made even worse by no healthcare with accidents becoming life-changing events.
March 11th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
This is a great graphic.
You might want to check out some of our work on this subject. It’s not going to go away, as more countries motorize, and more types of vehicles and users share the same roads.
http://www.safetrec.berkeley.edu/research/internationalroadsafety.html
March 11th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Another thing to recognize is that the death rate rise in cars is partially do to the death rate dropping in a lot of other areas. Like diseases corresponding to dirty water.
March 11th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
All of Europe is low income while all of Africa is middle income?
March 11th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
[...] Infrastructurist Subscribe to site [...]
March 11th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
There is something that just seems ‘wrong’ about the graphic, to me it doesn’t mean anything.
Europe a ‘low income’ region……North America the same ‘per capita’ income as the middle east AND Sudan?….What is South Asia? there is no decernable legend for it’s color.
It should have been per miles driven, which would have made a better graphic that shows teh impact of both teh automotive culture versus transit as well as the infrastructure differances. If North America has a smaller death per 100,000 mile driven than Sub-Saharan Africa then that may be a somewhat useful graphic that something could be taken away from - as it is it is meaningless
March 12th, 2010 at 12:04 am
The graph is not wrong - it’s just badly drawn. The colors on the map correspond to regions; they don’t correspond to high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries. And the “Per 100,000″ part is presumably per 100,000 people, but it’s hard to say. The best data would include both per capita and per vehicle-km driven statistics, especially since the best theory of car accident death numbers, Smeed’s Law, predicts that the two statistics behave differently.
By the way, Eric: Reason stands for whoever funds it. Twenty years ago, when it got its money from Phillip Morris, it parroted tobacco talking points. Today, when it gets its money from ExxonMobil, it parrots auto and oil industry talking points. Rigor of research doesn’t figure into this. That’s how you get those back-of-the-envelope calculations that conclude 43% of the world’s population will never die.
If you want good libertarianism, here’s a better idea: read libertarians who actually have expertise in their fields. For example, read Ed Glaeser on urban issues. Glaeser occasionally does work for Brookings and the AEI, but he also publishes peer-reviewed papers and is considered the foremost expert on urban economics. I’m not trolling here - I became a much better informed liberal after I learned that everything that comes out of CAP and CEPR is garbage.
March 12th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Over the years, people in general and Americans in particular have decided to live with the risks of driving in order to enjoy the speed and convenience it affords. One of the reasons why most folks are a lot more afraid of air travel is that when a passenger plane crashes, it takes out people in “case lots” and makes big headlines. Motor vehicle fatalities are rarely more than four or five per incident, and often just the driver “buys the farm”. Furthermore, auto casualties tend to be younger and poorer, while airplane failures take out the more affluent and sometimes the more newsworthy. And why should it be necessary to have a law requiring motorists to wear seat belts? I’ve been using them ever since 1963, when my first wife insisted that I install after-market belts in the old clunker we had. When that car failed I relocated the belts to our next third-hand banger. I think it was the car after that which was involved in a collision that totalled the car, but all I got was a scratched knee. I’ve been gung-ho for safety belts ever since!
March 12th, 2010 at 8:00 am
[...] to a new infographic by Infrastructurist, you’re actually safer if you’re in a richer [...]
March 12th, 2010 at 10:07 am
I think Reason is intellectually honest and consistent. Playing the funding game is silly, and it’s lame to take an unpopular person and tag your enemies by some imagined association. Put it this way, who “funds” Infrastructurist?
March 12th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Why does all of Europe have a LOWER income than all of Africa?? This graphic is useless.
March 12th, 2010 at 10:22 am
I’m sorry, that’s the shittiest infographic I’ve seen it a long time, and it’s a real shame because the data is so important. The same color scheme is used to indicate three different things (income, continent and laws) in four sections of the chart. The continents are gerrymandered so that the Americas and “Africa” have the exact same number of fatalities - Tunisia is included in “Africa” here, while it is not included in the WHO African Region.
There could be so much done with the data in that report (PDF) that it’s frustrating to see such shoddy work. The best part of this graphic - the fact that overall, road deaths involve the richest 16% of the population owning half the vehicles, but only comprising 8% of fatalities - is lifted directly from page 11 of the WHO report.
March 12th, 2010 at 10:52 am
CARS: THE ALTERNATIVE TO POVERTY
Of course, traffic deaths are regrettable and great progress has been made in their reduction. Traffic deaths in the United States today are about the same as in the late 1950s, despite the fact that driving has increased to 5x the rate at that time.
Virtually everyone who uses a car recognizes the risks. The connection between the superior personal mobility provided by cars and the eradication of poverty could not be more clear. That is why car ownership expands as fast as people can afford cars, whether in the United States, Europe, China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A more revealing and relevant graphic would show traffic deaths compared to gross domestic product.
March 12th, 2010 at 11:16 am
Infographic: FAIL
So many comparisons, so few colors! If you’re going to color-code anything in a graphic, it’s got to be consistent across the entire image.
Why would you group North and South America? Group Mongolia and Australia? Kazakhstan and Great Britain?
Deaths per 100,000… people? vehicles?
I’m new to Infrastructuralist and this is not really doing anything to keep coming back.
March 12th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Virtually everyone who uses a car recognizes the risks. The connection between the superior personal mobility provided by cars and the eradication of poverty could not be more clear. That is why car ownership expands as fast as people can afford cars, whether in the United States, Europe, China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Tell that to all the lower middle class workers who have to drive to work in used cars they can barely afford.
March 12th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
One thing that this ignores is the trend in traffic safety — which is for very significant improvement over time.
Here’s the link to the Federal Highway Administration fatality statistics from 1900 to 2007:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2007/fi200.cfm
Fatalities per 100,000,000 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) did not fall below ten until 1945. By 1970, they had fallen below five and, by 1991, below two.
Here’s a recent press release showing the preliminary 2009 figure to be 1.16.
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/template.MAXIMIZE/menuitem.f2217bee37fb302f6d7c121046108a0c/?javax.portlet.tpst=1e51531b2220b0f8ea14201046108a0c_ws_MX&javax.portlet.prp_1e51531b2220b0f8ea14201046108a0c_viewID=detail_view&itemID=d874f34635347210VgnVCM1000002fd17898RCRD&pressReleaseYearSelect=2010
Anything above zero is unacceptable, but let us applaud the downward trend and work to continue this record.
There are several reasons for this trend, including tougher laws, better enforcement, better education of drivers, and safer cars (seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, etc.). A key one is better roads. In 2007, approximately 40% of total working weekday VMT in major U.S. urbanized areas was on freeways (FHWA, Highway Statistics 2007, Table HM-72, “Urbanized Areas — Selected Characteristics”), which are far safer than surface roads.
In much of the less developed world, the road system is is where the U.S. was in the 1950’s, or the 1920’s, or even earlier. Worse, there is large and growing urban vehicle traffic on roads that were never designed for it. To the extent that roads improve in these nations over time — a rather large “if” — traffic fatality rates per VMT can be expected to decline substantially.
Of course, the big reason why the total number of fatalites is increasing world-wide is the increase in VMT (although, in the U.S., the total number of traffic fatalities has been trending downward for many years even as population, registered vehicles, and VMT grow substantally). Growth is VMT is key to economic growth — and, to a great extent, to the health of the people. Mobility brings greater access to food, as well as additional income to afford the food — and access to health care. While transit is an option for some types of people travel, goods movement on transit is not.
By the way, if we assume that the 2009 statistic of 1.16 fatality per 100,000,000 vehicle miles will exist for the foreseeable future, and apply a passenger car vehicle occupancy of 1.58 (U.S. DOT/Research & Innovative Technology Administration, “Pocket Guide to Transportation 2009,” tables 4-1 and 4-3, for the 2006 reporting year), that works out to one fatality per 54.6 million passenger car passenger miles. With passenger car passenger miles of 2,658,621 million in 2006 (Table 4-3), and a U.S. population of 299.4 million (Census Bureau, 2006 population estimate), that’s 8,900 passenger car passenger miles per capita per year.
So, to die from driving in a passenger car, it appears that the average person in the U.S. would have to drive for about 6,100 years.
I can live with that.
March 12th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
[i]CARS: THE ALTERNATIVE TO POVERTY
Of course, traffic deaths are regrettable and great progress has been made in their reduction. Traffic deaths in the United States today are about the same as in the late 1950s, despite the fact that driving has increased to 5x the rate at that time.
Virtually everyone who uses a car recognizes the risks. The connection between the superior personal mobility provided by cars and the eradication of poverty could not be more clear. That is why car ownership expands as fast as people can afford cars, whether in the United States, Europe, China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[/i]
And this, my friends, is a textbook example of intellectual dishonesty.
March 12th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
This is an absolutely brilliant piece and graphic. Thanks.
March 12th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
The list of “just” ten countries that account for 62% of traffic fatalities contains 55% of the world’s population. Hmm.
March 12th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
This graphic would’ve been helpful in my own piece.
I was speculating on the likeliness someone would die from a traffic accident vs. being a victim of gang violence, especially within the LA context.
http://www.examiner.com/x-36206-LA-County-Social-Policy-Examiner~y2010m2d24-Public-safety-means-more-than-just-cops
March 12th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Who needs to get into a car? The cars come to you!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/03/san-bernardino-woman-dies-after-speeding-truck-smashes-into-her-home.html
March 12th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Do you think 43% of the world’s population will never die?
March 12th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Tom, you’re making the same mistake Reason’s making - you’re just hiding it by multiplying both the numerator and the denominator by the number of miles driven.
March 12th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
People who hit at the multiple meanings of color have it right. The gerrymandered continents? Also ridiculous. Why does SE Asia include South Asia and some of SE Asia but not Japan, Korea, or Taiwan? Or China? Morocco is part of the Middle East but Algeria is part of Africa? Mongolia in “Western Pacific” and Russia in “Europe”?
Further, 62% of fatalities in 10 countries? Well, what are those countries? A list of the largest 5 or 6 countries plus a few others. So? I care more about probabilities — which would suggest conveying places with the highest fatality rate per capita or per car owner.
I would also prefer to see how many people are affected by the laws rather than X% of countries. Are those large or small countries? Are we talking Sealand and Liechtenstein or China and the US?
Pretty graphic, but TERRIBLE at conveying information. TERRIBLE. Tufte could use this as an example of poor graphical communication.
March 12th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Wendell Cox: confusing correlation with causation since 1999!
March 12th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
[...] Cars: The Road Out of Poverty Jump to Comments Re: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/03/11/how-cars-are-killing-us-around-the-world/ [...]
March 12th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
i always think its funny how over protective paranoid parents who watch too much nightly news and worry about their kids wouldnt think of letting them take a bus to school or the friends house, but dont think twice about giving their 16 year old a car to drive everywhere.
March 12th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
There’s no correlation, even. The rate of US traffic fatalities per capita started falling recently; the current rate is 25% below 2005 levels. The linked news article explains,
If you want to see the long-term trend, up until 1980, look at pages 2-3 here. In the years following the Interstate Highway Act fatalities per VMT flatlined, while total fatalities skyrocketed; it wasn’t until the Highway Safety Act that the pre-1950s downward trend resumed.
(Bear in mind, the article argues that the safety measures did not matter much, and instead what happened is that long-term deaths followed Smeed’s law. But neither hypothesis leaves much room for the notion that building more highways causes fewer people to die.)
March 13th, 2010 at 12:30 am
I feel the car culture should be phased out altogether in many of the more densely populated parts of our country. Also I would favor an all out ban on car ads on TV and radio for somewhat the same reasons we do with cigarette ads. Pesonally I think the seatbelt laws are a bad idea from a civil rights angle. The idea auto travel as a symbol of freedom is a big fat joke! If we really wanted to auto travel to be safe instead of forcing people to buckle up against their will we should be looking into accident prevention measures somewhat similar to what’s been prevelent in the railway industry for over a century if we really wanted to but I have much doubt that’ll happen my lifetime. This is why I continue be a strong passenger train/urban rail transit advocate since I was a kid. If we really want to have safe transportation we’d better prepared spend a far greater amount of transit money towards more and better urban rail and passenger train systems partly with the idea of making it easier for those of us who are sick and tired of the crappy safety policies of the car culture to have a decent transportation alternative.
March 13th, 2010 at 3:35 am
It really lowers the credibility of this grpahic to have countries like the UK, Monaco, Switzerlanf, Lichtenstein, Luxemburg and “Low Income Countries” do you have any idea of the average per capita income in Switzerland?
March 13th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Geez, what a bunch of whiny little critics!
Yes, Tim, Dr. Rock, Cap’n Transit, I’m talking to you.
OK…
will one of the commenters PLEASE take the data in the car death chart make a better chartm and upload that better one to this website, so that we can be helped, instead of just reading how smart you are and how bad the graphic is!?
sincerely,
–Michael McGettigan/trophy bikes philadelphia
March 13th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Leaving aside the possible economic effects (positive or negative) of car ownership in society, I’m wondering if anyone has looked at historic death rates (per capita, per capita/miles) of horse ridership in the preautomotive days. Far, far lower, I am sure(speed kills) but not zero. It might be interesting, if not informative.
March 13th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
David: cigarettes, too, used to be a symbol of freedom. The tobacco companies denied that smoking caused cancer for decades; well into the 1980s and 90s, the Tobacco Institute claimed that cigarettes were not addictive and second-hand smoke was harmless. Pollsters like Mark Penn, who later ran Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, proposed to do smokers’ rights focus groups, to help the tobacco companies keep selling death as freedom.
The connection to the thread’s issue is that Reason got a lot of money from Phillip Morris to promote those angles; it was only recently that it stopped echoing tobacco industry FUD and moved to auto and oil industry FUD. One could even snark that Reason is pretending 43% of the world’s population is immortal because then it can aggressively market cigarettes to those 43%…
March 13th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Key thing to take away from this is that automobile travel is extremely dangerous and should be considered highly impractical unless the mortality and injury rates can be brought down to a small fraction of what they are today.
Even if this were to be achieved, the accelerating global environmental crisis makes the excessive environmental footprint of automobile travel impractical especially, with India and China coming online.
The technological solution is quite simple for what should be considered — on a scale greater than cigarettes and asbestos — a manmade treatable and preventable disease.
March 14th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
[...] reduce urban road traffic volumes: Does it matter how planners frame the problem? [Science Direct] How Cars Are Killing Us Around the World [The [...]
March 16th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
It’s a surprise to see the WHO support the “booze, belts, and helmets” version of traffic safety. Considering that most of the 1.2 million killed are hit by motorist while walking, it’s time for a new approach addressing road design. I encourage the WHO to promote the Swedish and Norwegian Vision Zero approach.
April 1st, 2010 at 7:22 pm
[...] easily overpower and crush a person. It is a national travesty that we have become accustomed to significantly high death rates in our transportation system when there are safer alternatives. Lightweight vehicles change the [...]