US News & World Report, Michael Barone: Good News on Auto Accident Trends
The number of people killed in traffic accidents every year is daunting: 42,682 in 2006. That's more than the number of Americans killed in the Korean War and more than 10 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq.
But there's good news here. The number of traffic fatalities is going down—down 2 percent from 2005 to 2006. The relevant figure here is the number of traffic fatalities per 1 million miles driven. In 2006, that number was 1.42, the lowest number in American history, according to NHTSA's 2006 Traffic Safety Annual Assessment. Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, Volume 4, Pages 4-840 and 4-841, confirm this. There were 37,819 traffic fatalities, nearly 90 percent of the 2006 figure, as long ago as 1937, and the rate per million miles of travel was 14.00, nearly 10 times the rate for 2006. The peak years for traffic fatalities were 1969, 1972, and 1973, with 55,043, 55,600, and 55,096. But a lot more people were driving then than in 1937, and the fatalities per million miles driven had fallen to 5.18, 4.41, and 4.20, respectively. Now it's down to 1.42 per million miles driven—a huge change.
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