From FEE:

Traffic Deaths Are an Overlooked Health Problem, WHO Says
4/20/2007
"Traffic injuries are the leading cause of death in people ages 10 to 24 around the world -- a huge, overlooked and largely preventable public health problem, the World Health Organization said yesterday." (Washington Post, Friday)

Who runs the roads?

FEE Timely Classic
"Roads Without the State" by Peter Samuel

From the latter article (which is not about crashes, but control):

Given our history of state dominance of highways this century, we have huge vested interests in its continuance: state highway bureaucracies, an industry of contractors and consultants with connections to those bureaucracies, and legislators for whom highway pork projects are part of the political medium of exchange. Two arguments are deployed that buttress the statist status quo for tax-financed highways—that taxes are the most practical and most fair way to pay for roads. Both are widely believed, but dubious. On fairness, it is said to be more burdensome for the worker earning $30,000 or the welfare mom on $15,000 to pay a $2 toll than it is for a rich person making over $100,000. That is true, of course. Any expense is less burdensome to the rich than to the poor, which is a major reason that people work. The inexorable logic of the tolls-are-unfair argument is that prices for goods and services generally are unfair, which leads to a case for socializing everything and distributing goods through the state according to some godly judgment of “need.” But in the real world, where capitalism and markets have been found a rather practical way of getting people to work on behalf of one another via exchanges of goods and services, prices are central.

Indeed, the lack of pricing and markets for highway services is at the root of many of our highway problems. There is a constant moan from people about the lack of money for roads, a complaint you never hear in respect of building new electric generating plants, telephone lines, computer factories, car plants, or pig farms. Because those products sell for a price, their producers are able to raise money by going out into the capital markets with estimates of the profits they may be able to generate through their proposed investment. So if highways were priced with tolls, the highway service providers could raise capital for good toll highway projects based on the prospective stream of future revenues.

My emphasis.