Every year on November 11 we make a point of remembering all those who died due to war. World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history, killing 70 - 85 million people (see Wikipedia and the excellent interactive film The Fallen of World War II). Remembrance Day is when we are encouraged to remember those deaths, and all those that came before and after due to military conflict, in hopes that if we truly understand the scope of the horror, we will do everything we can to avoid causing a similar situation.
The number of war dead has fluctuated ever since, but has never come close to the appalling heights of WWII. No global set of data is available for traffic deaths. Some countries still do not track the number of deaths due to traffic, and others underreport them, but it's possible to approximate them based on known figures for global population and traffic fatality rates in those countries where data are available.
How do traffic deaths compare with those due to armed conflict?
The number of people killed by motor vehicles since 1950 is comparable to the number of people killed in World War II, and ten times the deaths worldwide due to armed conflict over the same period. The war dead are elevated as heroes, in the belief, or at least the hope, that their deaths were a necessary sacrifice to achieve a worthwhile cause. In contrast, every traffic death is unnecessary, and is not a sacrifice but a tragedy.
North American cities have been designed to encourage vehicle traffic. Cities subsidize cars by building straight roads that facilitate high speed, wide roads and parking lots so that drivers can park their cars at public expense, and frequently maintained roads to deal with the erosion and damage done by motor vehicles. Then its citizens pay a "car tax" in the form of a police force that has to spend much of its time keeping road users safe from each other, and emergency responders and hospitals ready to deal with the constant flow of suffering from thousands of casualty crashes every year on Vancouver Island alone.
If we are to take remembering WWII seriously at all, we ought to remember our accumulated traffic dead at least as seriously. And if the intent of remembering is to make a change in the world rather than just to perform social theatre, we should foster a data-driven mindset and take the risk and threat of traffic about ten times more seriously than the risk of war. This implies the need to reengineer our culture and cities to reduce the figurative and literal impact of cars and traffic.
Not many of us can do anything about stopping war. We can help the victims, but we can't stop politicians from making poor choices. However, we can make better choices in our daily lives, especially here in Victoria which has one of the nicest climates for biking and walking in the entire world. When we drive, we effectively vote for more roads, more traffic, less effective public transit, deaths, injuries, air and water pollution, traffic noise, urban sprawl, and a weaker democracy due to political interference from vested interests such as the fossil fuel industry.
Since 1993, some have observed a second Remembrance Day, on the third Sunday of November: the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (in British Columbia this event occurs on the third Wednesday of November). Last September, one of those victims was a 76-year-old pedestrian on Interurban Road. Last May, one of them was Oak Bay Public Works inspector Steve Seekins, killed by a driver of an SUV in Oak Bay. Two years ago, one of them was Saanich Grade 11 student Kaydence Bourque, killed by a driver of a pickup truck on Cedar Hill Cross Road. Most of us know someone, or at least know of someone, whose life has been shattered or ended due to a bad interaction with a motor vehicle.
Someone dies as a result of a motor vehicle crash somewhere in the world about every 26 seconds. Each of those deaths was caused by someone saying to themselves "I think I'll take the car today.” Do you feel comfortable in that driver's seat?
Steve Hansen Smythe, November 2023Sources:
What about my country of Canada? For war dead we lost ~68,000 in WWI, ~47,000 in WWII, 516 in Korea, and 158 in Afghanistan. Traffic deaths appear to be going down (see Canadian Motor Vehicle Traffic Collision Statitics and the average deaths per year the last two decades is about 2000, so over the last 24 years about the same number of people have died on Canadian streets as died in WWII. People in the U.S. are three times more likely to die in traffic than in Canada (in 2021, 12.89 vs 4.27 fatalities per 100,000, respectively).