I just sorta assumed this was true (in no small part because I accept xkcd as infallible gospel). But I was curious and just dug into it, and it appears that the fatality rate for accidents with injury in the US is among the lowest. And while the accident-with-injury rate is higher in the US than the combined EU + EFTA it’s not so different as to change this relationship. I really didn’t expect that, and I wish I could find more recent data to see how the trend has changed up to today (the best data I could find on this was from 2015 - which is well into the era of the US fixation on suburban combat vehicles, but as they may make up a higher % of all vehicles on the road now, I’m very curious to see what the current data shows)
(Chart in spoiler because I don't want to clutter up the thread:)
This is heavily dependent on incident report rates. Incidents are underreported in countries where insurance doesn’t require police reports and/or litigation risk is much lower.
Deaths are pretty well recorded, and there you see that the US is much higher in vehicle deaths per capita. Deaths per billion vehicle-km is also useful, as you can argue that per capita the US drives a lot more, so you will see more incidents due to the traffic exposure being higher.
Summarizing:
The US has well over twice as many traffic deaths per capita at 110+ vs 45 in the EU. The worst EU country is Romania with 78.
The US is closer when you compare kms driven: about 7 deaths per billion km, still way higher than northern Europe (2-4) and about on par with Belgium (that’s unfortunately not something to be proud of). Quite a bit safer than the lower scoring countries though on that metric, like 14.4 for the Czech Republic.
(I addressed per-captia deaths vs. distance driven in another comment earlier, I do quite agree)
I think averaging the rates across the EU is a counterproductive, or outright obfuscating, metric. While it is a basis for comparison, the data varies so wildly from country to country it serves only to obscure the realities of the situation. The report I’m sourcing from does make it clear that countries may be underreporting their accident rates:
The comparability of data is also subject to differences in road accident reporting standards.
Notably, the number of accidents and the number of injuries may be underreported in some
countries due to administrative or practical limitations.
And the cited article from that section is quite interesting. In particular,
For estimations of the real volumes it is not necessary to have all accidents reported by the police.
By using other sources, such as cause of death statistics and medical and insurance databases, it is
possible to get a more accurate assessment. These additional databases can also provide supplementary
information on accidents or the outcome of an accident, including the types and severity of injuries.
which does appear to be how CARE is sourcing their data (although their dashboard is some godawful Qlik thing so I was not able to determine sources for all of their metrics)
I just sorta assumed this was true (in no small part because I accept xkcd as infallible gospel). But I was curious and just dug into it, and it appears that the fatality rate for accidents with injury in the US is among the lowest. And while the accident-with-injury rate is higher in the US than the combined EU + EFTA it’s not so different as to change this relationship. I really didn’t expect that, and I wish I could find more recent data to see how the trend has changed up to today (the best data I could find on this was from 2015 - which is well into the era of the US fixation on suburban combat vehicles, but as they may make up a higher % of all vehicles on the road now, I’m very curious to see what the current data shows)
(Chart in spoiler because I don't want to clutter up the thread:)
Source
The report this is pulled from excludes non-injury MV accidents
This is heavily dependent on incident report rates. Incidents are underreported in countries where insurance doesn’t require police reports and/or litigation risk is much lower.
Deaths are pretty well recorded, and there you see that the US is much higher in vehicle deaths per capita. Deaths per billion vehicle-km is also useful, as you can argue that per capita the US drives a lot more, so you will see more incidents due to the traffic exposure being higher.
Summarizing: The US has well over twice as many traffic deaths per capita at 110+ vs 45 in the EU. The worst EU country is Romania with 78. The US is closer when you compare kms driven: about 7 deaths per billion km, still way higher than northern Europe (2-4) and about on par with Belgium (that’s unfortunately not something to be proud of). Quite a bit safer than the lower scoring countries though on that metric, like 14.4 for the Czech Republic.
(I addressed per-captia deaths vs. distance driven in another comment earlier, I do quite agree)
I think averaging the rates across the EU is a counterproductive, or outright obfuscating, metric. While it is a basis for comparison, the data varies so wildly from country to country it serves only to obscure the realities of the situation. The report I’m sourcing from does make it clear that countries may be underreporting their accident rates:
And the cited article from that section is quite interesting. In particular,
which does appear to be how CARE is sourcing their data (although their dashboard is some godawful Qlik thing so I was not able to determine sources for all of their metrics)