I heard the car is the deadliest weapon created by humans and that the number of lives it has claimed exceeds the death toll from atomic weapons, guns or bombing. Is this true? And what are the grisly figures involved?
(Continued)
• By not considering the less developed countries, some of your previous correspondents have neglected nearly 90 per cent of deaths caused by road traffic accidents. The World Health Organization estimates the total is 1.2 million deaths per year, the majority of these probably being pedestrians and cyclists.
It is also necessary to add the deaths from "traffic-related air pollution", as another WHO report terms it. These have been estimated as between 0.8 times (in New Zealand) and three times (in Switzerland) as high as the accident-related death rate, so perhaps it would be correct to double the estimate of deaths due to motor vehicles to 2.4 million.
We ...
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