The National Safety Council (a nonprofit group) has some numbers on deaths caused by cars during the coronavirus crisis.

Preliminary estimates from the National Safety Council based on May data from all 50 states indicate that for the third month in a row, road users in the U.S. were at a higher risk of dying from a motor vehicle crash. As reported in Injury Facts, the fatality rate per miles driven in May – when most of the country was deep in quarantine from the pandemic – jumped a staggering 23.5% compared to the previous year, despite far less traffic on the roads. The number of miles driven in May dropped 25.5% compared to the year prior. The increased rate comes in spite of an estimated 8% drop in the number of deaths for May compared to the prior year. Overall, the mileage death rate per 100 million vehicle miles driven was 1.47 in May compared to 1.19 in 2019.

National Safety Council

There are some questions you could ask, like how do the 2019 numbers compare to the average of the last 3 or 5 years. But I also know we have seen an unusual number of grisly pedestrian and bicyclist deaths in my city this year (these make the news, while people dying in highway accidents sadly aren’t even headline news because we are so used to and accepting of this totally unacceptable risk.) I think it is pretty obvious what is going on. Narrow lanes, trees, parked cars, and other traffic send a message to the human brain to slow down. For some reason, seeing human beings walking or bicycling causes some people to slow down, while others seem to be oblivious, reckless, or occasionally intentionally aggressive. Most of these people are not bad people the rest of the time. It just seems to be human nature to speed up when we see an open space in front of us. So decreasing traffic, in the absence of better design measures and consistent enforcement, won’t solve this problem. Education may help but doesn’t seem to reach everyone. I think design is the answer and I’ve said it before – just copy the Dutch street design manual and be done with it.