Honestly, the safety bar set by human drivers is on the floor (and being run over by a "light truck").
"""The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. """
"""The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. "
Ignoring some important details, that means americans drive 75 million miles before a person is killed. That seems .... awfully damn good to me.
The US is #5 (of 26 countries for which the statistic is available) in fatalities / km. That's only "awfully damn good to me" if your goal is to kill more people.
As the sibling comment points out, miles driven per death for pedestrians isn’t necessarily being improved by the mass and visibility and safety factors.
Proportional to population, pedestrian fatalities have risen significantly since 2010.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
I do not disagree the numbers are trending up (although, I believe rates/miles driven might show a different story, but I didn't grab the miles driven for years 1975-2021 to normalize).
Americans drive 400 MILLION miles before a pedestrian death.
Let that sink in. 400 million miles per ped death. That's just absolutely gob-smacking amazingly good for something involving direct human control of an enormous ton+ vehicle.