More info on risk, particularly traffic related.

First, traffic accidents aren't likely to be what kills you (2 to 5% chance), although they are a leading cause of death among the young and among people travelling. (ref1, ref2). But assuming you're interested in reducing that risk anyway, should you decide to live in US or Europe? Should you decide to live in a city or in the countryside? Drive an SUV or a compact? I don't have all the answers today, but I did look up the numbers for US vs Europe. This car safety site has an international statistics page with numbers from WHO reports. I'll grab the following numbers for use later:

• 120,000 total deaths from traffic accidents in Europe in 1995
• 40,676 total traffic fatalities in US in 1994
• 41,907 total traffic fatalities in US in 1996

That's not very interesting in and of itself. I want to know how many deaths there are per capita (assuming that one is driving roughly the average miles per year for the area) or how many deaths there are per mile driven (because that can be affected by behavioral changes). Per capita numbers are easy to get, using the following numbers:

• 512,000,000 Europeans in 1992
• 260,327,021 US population in 1994
• 265,228,572 in 1996

Doing the math that gives:

• Roughly 234.4 deaths per million in Europe in 1995
• 156.2 deaths per million in US in 1994
• 158 deaths per million in US in 1996

Note that although the comparisons may not be exact (the studies may have counted things somewhat differently, my population estimate for Europe was surely a bit low given it was for the wrong year), these differences are large enough to say that Europeans have been more likely to die from traffic than Americans.

Finally, I found death per vehicle-kilometer rate information for all of Europe for 1998, and death-per mile (of course) for US. Some highlights

• At the top, Greece: 57.4 deaths per billion km, or 9.2 per 100 million miles
• France: 16.4 deaths per billion km, or 2.6 per 100 million miles
• Germany: 12.4 deaths per billion km, or 2.0 deaths per 100 million miles
• US: 1.6 deaths per 100 million miles driven (also in 1998 though from a different source)
• UK: 7.5 deaths per billion km, or 1.2 deaths per 100 million miles

I didn't pick the worst offenders -- only three European countries (Netherlands, UK and Sweden) out of fourteen are safer to drive in than US.