I was looking at the front page of an Edmonton newspaper from the 1940s that my father had kept as a souvenir and right on the front page on the bottom was a tally of traffic deaths!

That the newspaper would be tracking this fact so prominently suggests that at the time it was news that a car crashed and injured/killed someone.

From this newspaper it seems to me that at some point we were concerned the casualties coming from automobile use. At some point I guess the news became dull to it, stopped reporting, and thus people in general stopped caring. Unsure when that happened and why.