I wasn't really surprised by that. My county is corrupt to the core, and intentional hit and runs are written up and reported as accidental, unless you aren't paying or related to people.

that's crazy to think about, you think of cities being way worse, but I guess it does make sense.

Rural people drive faster, and there are very few pedestrians.

Smaller cities are light on pedestrians and very car focused, meaning those few pedestrians have drivers who are less used to pedestirans, and drivers still drive like they're on highways.

I was in Albuquerque recently, and I have never felt less safe as a pedestrian. You have people swerving through intersections, being surprised we were walking on the walk signal, upset with us, we had to walk around parked cars, into traffic, it was horrible.

I think for this map to be salvaged you need to fix the denominator and not use political boundaries for aggregation. Hexagons or raster because the entire point is to make it arbitrary. The formula would need to be something like (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Road Miles Traveled Per capita), or maybe (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Sum of length of roads per cell).

Regardless, its still a population map because the denominator gets really small in rural areas, and the map still doesn't tell us anything about how safe or dangerous roads are.

#EvenThatMapEndsUpBeingAMapOfPopulation,ButMoreOfABoolean,BecausePeopleDon'tDieWhereThereAren'tPeopleAndItTakesTwoToTango