Comparing fatalities per 100k people seems like a pretty useless statistic when we're talking about safety standards. If you look at fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles it's 12.9 compared to 130. So 10x as much. An even better statistic to use would be fatalities per 1 billion vehicle miles. But that data isn't available for India.

Non-motorized transportation options aren't counted in vehicle miles. So accidents involving pedastrians, bicycles and other bystanders would skew this some. Since car accidents don't just hurt other motorists it's useful to measure this against the total population.

Is it not useful to look at both the statistic you mention along with the ones you responded to? They may not be equal in importance, but merit some consideration, no?

Also, looking at accidents per distance driven hides hides the fact that more time spent on the road is a societal choice that also leads to more fatalities.

To get a decent idea of what's going on, you need to know VMT per capita, fatalities per vmt, how many crashes are fatal, and ideally quite a few other things (urban/rural mix, etc.).

One of the best ways to make roads safer would be to just let people drive less. The US has fairly safe roads per VMT (by world standards), but people end up driving a lot more than in most other places, which negates this somewhat.

I'd argue that even by VMT the US isn't that safe - it's still double the fatalities compared to the UK.

Agreed - thus my comment that this is comparing to the world. Western Europe has remarkably "safe" roads (scare quotes because we call them safe despite tens of thousands of people dying per year).

Of course, one problem is that despite being a very small percentage of the distance traveled, people walking account for 22% of deaths. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

HAhahaha, and if you believe Indian government statistics I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn . . .