Rate per distance is not that great of a metric either, though. Increasing distance does not necessarily increase risk equally. A car that drives a long stretch on a highway is unlikely to hit a pedestrian, but inside a city, or on a shared country road this becomes much more likely. Distance travelled would be inflated in this case for the car, and the metrics would end up being much lower.
Furthermore, because walking is generally done for short distances, any incident would inflate this rate much more for pedestrians.
You preferably want to have some measure of risk for a single trip. If a trip were to be made by another mode of transport, would it still have occurred? A proxy for this can be the severity: How high is the chance that an incident is fatal there between two modes of transport, given that an incident occurs? You may also wish to account for the likelihood of an interaction. Which also provides another means of improving: what infrastructure was involved? Disentangling two modes of transport makes them less likely to interact.
Sorry for this long rant, but I really dislike rate / distance as a means of normalizing a metric that is meant to indicate the relative safety.
Your logic is wrong. There’s less of them total so of course there’s less fatalities total. It says nothing about rate per distance driven.
Rate per distance is not that great of a metric either, though. Increasing distance does not necessarily increase risk equally. A car that drives a long stretch on a highway is unlikely to hit a pedestrian, but inside a city, or on a shared country road this becomes much more likely. Distance travelled would be inflated in this case for the car, and the metrics would end up being much lower. Furthermore, because walking is generally done for short distances, any incident would inflate this rate much more for pedestrians.
You preferably want to have some measure of risk for a single trip. If a trip were to be made by another mode of transport, would it still have occurred? A proxy for this can be the severity: How high is the chance that an incident is fatal there between two modes of transport, given that an incident occurs? You may also wish to account for the likelihood of an interaction. Which also provides another means of improving: what infrastructure was involved? Disentangling two modes of transport makes them less likely to interact.
Sorry for this long rant, but I really dislike rate / distance as a means of normalizing a metric that is meant to indicate the relative safety.
Oh no I agree with you
Never trust a chart unless you falsified it yourself.