Who is dying more in traffic accidents?

Blacks died 35% more in motor vehicle accidents in the Racial Reckoning year of 2021 than in 2019: should anyone deign to notice?

Below are a bunch of graphs I made up about traffic fatality trends as background for an analysis I’m working on. I haven’t figured out what my conclusion is going to be yet, but I figure I’ll post these for you now.

One issue is that we have pretty good data on two kinds of apples and oranges: how many total miles are driven (the government appears to count each month how many cars go by at 5,000 checkpoints around the country) and who is dying due to motor vehicle accidents by race/ethnicity (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc.). But we have only intermittent survey data on miles driven per capita by race/ethnicity.

I have yet to find an annual data source on miles driven per capita by race allowing per mile driven trends to be graphed reliably.

And it’s not totally clear to me which measure of traffic fatalities is of more relevance: per capita or per mile driven? Both seem interesting in different ways.

So, I’m going to present both kinds of data that appears to me to be of relevance.

First, miles driven per capita by the total U.S. population:

Americans almost doubled their miles driven per capita between 1970 and the Bush Housing Bubble of the 2000s.

This graph represents a 12 month moving average by month, so it smooths out the annual peaks in summer. You can see the sharp downturns during the gasoline price hikes of 1973 and 1979 and covid in 2020.

The biggest single event interrupting the upward trend was the Great Recession of 2008: we were over 10,000 miles per year driven from part of 2004 through part of 2008, but we are still not quite back to that level yet in July 2024.

A federal survey in 2017 found that whites drive the most miles per year per capita of the four biggest races (I’m equivocating because #5 American Indians might drive a lot: they certainly die in traffic accidents a lot):

On the other hand, whites do more of their miles on empty rural highways, with less traffic but higher speed limits. It’s all very complicated …

As I may have mentioned once or twice, the CDC tabulates every single death certificate in the U.S., including hot button issues like deaths due to motor vehicle accidents and homicides, and provides a helpful WONDER interface for analyzing them statistically.

Let’s look at the CDC’s motor vehicle accident death rates per capita (not per miles driven):