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Tech

Where in the World Are We Driving Ourselves to Death?

In a word, everywhere. But it's not just because we're on our phones.

In a word, everywhere. About 1.24 million people die on the roads each year already, and that figure is set to triple to 3.6 million by 2030. Fatal road accidents happen so frequently that it becomes easy to lose sight of their standing in today's taxonomy of death, especially throughout the developing world. There, road-death counts have hit pandemic levels, on pace to suprass HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other still-common killers as the fifith most common cause of death.

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That's according to the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease report. It's a killer in plain sight, something rooted as much in the ways technology is or isn't taking our eyes off the road as it is in our commitment, or lack thereof, to maintaining critical infrastructure and enforcing basic safety standards. Toggle around this new interactive feature from the Pulitzer Center and you'll get the idea. The map charts every traffic death in the world, color sorting deaths in 2010 (the most recent year for which we have data) by 100,000 people. Here are some key takeaways, among others.

American roads still aren't safe. The US has long been a leader is car safety, and yet of every 100,000 Americans, 11.4 die on the road. Shockingly, New York City is home to some of the safest streets in the world, according to the WHO. But does it justfiy the honking?

Don't know how to drive? No problem. In many countries, you simply don't need prior driving experience to acquire a license. The Pulitzer Center sites Nigeria, where the Federal Road Safety Commission only just began requiring prospective drivers to take driving lessons and pass a test before getting the all clear to get behind the wheel. Before, it was a simple matter of buying your way onto the road.

Scandinavia is cured. Sweden, specifically, a country that logged only 266 road deaths in all of 2010. That's about three fatalities for every 100,000 people. "If road fatalities are a disease," Pulitzer writes, "Sweden has proven that it is one that can be eradicated."

So is Australia. Just as it's a case study for gun control, so it is for driving safety. Pulitzer calls in the "poster boy for reforming bad habits," noting how road kills down under have seen an 80 percent drop over the last 60 years as strict driving laws became the norm.

Here comes China. The People's Republic will soon topple the US as the most motorized nation on Earth, with 200 milliion vehicles on the road. At 20.5 deaths per 100,000 people, China is but one arm of a regional manufacturing boom that over the next 10 years will pump out more vehicles than all previous decades combined. If that's not reason enough to remember why car crash numbers don't spike when cell phone calls do, we should all be slowing down a bit.

@thebanderson