http://responsibility.org/drunk-driving/drunk-driving-fatali... http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
Thankfully, the CDC has done that, and here it is in an easy graphic:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_deat...
Unintentional injury dominates deaths in ages 1-44, and indeed the biggest killer of people ages 5-24 is traffic:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inju...
I'm not from the US, but over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers, and these cases are particular tragedies, but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves by stupidity, or at least consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
Another thing I could bring up from analysis of traffic deaths is the large number of suicides we have -- about 20 % of traffic deaths; this is becoming a burden on truck drivers because they carry a lot of the emotional burden when someone decide to smash their car at high speed to an oncoming truck.
And yet another astonishing factor is deaths of "natural causes" (heart attack, stroke etc) while driving. These make up something around 10-15 % of traffic deaths here.
> ...over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves or consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
You can't argue that problem is being overly focused on condemnation of the person who drinks and drives and then ignore our responsibility to keep them from hurting themselves either.
That number is highly biased towards the elderly. "Falls" are basically another kind of "died of old age". If you exclude people over 55, you get about:
- ~6,700 deaths from drunk driving
- 2,459 from falls
If you look at all driving fatalities (because we fleshy humans can be impaired by more than alcohol and often make mistakes), you have
- 25,499 deaths
Cars are deathtraps.
There's some interestin brain stuff going on for some of it. A person with failing vision (and dementia can cause some loss of vision even though the eyes and optic nerve work fine) will learn the layout of their home. A care worker comes in once a day and moves something? That person falls over.
Someone from my local MH trust realised that people with dementia in hospital could not see (because dementia) the zimmer frames and weren't using them. He painted them red. This means people can see them (red is one of the last colours to go) and thus they use them. This simple measure has reduced falls and the associated deaths and injuries.
The population of the US is roughly 310 million people. Using your figure for driving fatalities, 3.1x10^8 / 2.5x10^4 = 1/12400 chance of dying in a car accident. This tracks reasonably well with the admittedly outdated information in [1], which gives the odds of dying at home as 1/7875.
By your reasoning, then, my apartment is about 33% more deathtrap-y than my car, and I should probably consider living out of doors, as well as giving up my car and staying away from roads.
Except that, from the same data, my odds of dying at the hand of another person are about one in sixteen thousand. I live in a large city, so my options are starting to look pretty limited! Subsistence farming may be the only way. (Or perhaps hunting and gathering -- this is prime whitetail country, and there are few enough hunters for deer to've become a serious pest through overbreeding.)
All life is risk, and the outcome is known ahead of time - the probability of dying of something, given long enough, eventually reaches unity. Maintaining a healthy sense of perspective seems warranted.
[1] http://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.php
And almost everyone has a home every day, whereas people who drive/ride cars more are at mich higher risk of car dying than less-frequet riders
(Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...)
Also you have to consider a bunch of other variables such as the difference in the traveling distances between work, home, and play.
And take into consideration things such an increase of X in volume of traffic might increase deaths by kX. With k being 2 or 5 or 10.
And then the gap narrows.
Not the 10x difference, but still 2x.
The default mindset is so heavily dominated by the assumption that you'll drive that the building codes in most of the country require bars to have significant parking available for customers, even if the bar is in a heavily urban neighborhood and the owner would prefer to use the space for seating.
Getting to near zero drunk driver deaths is attainable once we change behavior. That's the acceptable number.
And waiting until the problem occurs is obviously not the time to try and change the behavior.
We can measure blood alcohol so we can estimate the degree of impairedness. Furthermore, it is already illegal.