The chart below shows the leading causes of ‘unintentional’ death in the US, 2019 to 2023. The chart is from Centers for Disease Control (CDC) WISQARS Leading Causes of Death page. Change filters to see the ‘unintentional’ data. Ironically, one of the available filters is ‘Violence-Related Injuries’, but these ‘Unintentional MV (motor vehicle) Traffic’ datum are not in that category, though they are clearly violence. Traffic violence. And of course not all is ‘unintentional’. And as with all traffic violence data, it does not include crashes that occur on private property, people run over in parking lots and children killed in their own driveway.

I often see it stated that traffic violence is the leading or second leading category of preventable death, but I find this more detailed view worthwhile.

Credit to Emergency Streets for the idea, and the link to CDC WISQARS. My selection criteria is slightly different than theirs. I’ll write soon about Emergency Streets.