CDC Traffic Fatalities: Good News and Bad News
The motor vehicle accident death rate drifted down in 2024, but is still up since Black Lives Matter started getting so many people killed.
Something that almost nobody knows other than my readers is that blacks became, on average, strikingly worse drivers per capita after Ferguson in 2014 unleashed the ironically lethal Black Lives Era.
Before Black Lives Matter, whites usually used to die the most per capita in traffic accidents (of course, whites drive the most per capita too) among the four major races/ethnicities. (American Indians die the most.)
Paywall here.
Across the entire population, traffic fatalities fell a lot during the Great Recession as the most marginal people drove less often and Americans partied less in general. The return of good times and the anti-police drove up death rates, but they’ve been drifting downward since 2021. Overall death rates are still up 15% since 2024 and 7% since 2019.
The good news is that black deaths in traffic fatalities per capita (not by miles driven, for which data is only estimated ever few years) have been dropping since the peak of the Racial Reckoning in 2021. But, the black death rate was still 11% higher in 2024 than in 2019 and 45% higher in 2024 than in 2014.
The Hispanic death rate fell sharply after Bush’s Housing Bubble as the most economically marginal Hispanics returned to Latin America and cars became harder to afford. But during the George Floyd Era, Hispanics drove much worse, with their death rate peaking in 2022 (my impression is they got the message that cops were out of favor slower than blacks did) and has only drifted down slightly through 2024. The Hispanic death rate is up 39% over the last 10 years and up 24% over the last 5 years.
The white death rate on the roads is up 8% since 2014 and up 2% since 2019.
The Asian death rate is up 8% since 2014 (back when Asians and Pacific Islanders were lumped together in CDC mortality stats up through 2017) and up 14% since 2019.
Back decades ago when I was still reading the local paper, it seemed like whenever a whole family was killed, a drunk Hispanic-named man was arrested or killed also. I guess it'd be too difficult to track fatalities *caused* by race, and even more controversial.
The worst thing is that most blacks have long left the farm for town, so few are driving rural two-lane roads, theoretically the most dangerous. Instead, they're racing and wrecking on interstates and urban thoroughfares. I once had to mansplain to my sister's English friend about the higher risk of oncoming traffic vs. divided highways. That should have occurred to her, driving on the wrong side of the road as she does and all.
So, between motor vehicle accidents and homicides, how many "black lives" have been lost due to BLM? How many would be alive today had MVA and homicide rates remained at 2014 levels?
50,000? More?