By combining the data with traffic fatalities we feel our list offers a proxy for safety.
Though traffic fatalities have seen a historic drop in recent decades, young drivers remain at highest risk.
In the U.S. over the past 20 years, crime, traffic fatalities, air pollution and infant mortality have dropped.
Not only that, but deaths in vehicles of children under five years old is the biggest source of traffic fatalities.
"The strongest finding in this whole body of research is that traffic fatalities fall when the economy deteriorates, " says Christopher Ruhm, Ph.
As a result of strict enforcement, Kelley says he believes US Census data shows Massachusetts has the lowest rate of traffic fatalities in the nation.
But the wrecks mask a broader improvement: Overall traffic fatalities have been dropping in a "historic downward trend, " according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The situation in Korea right now resembles what happened when its highway system was first built and traffic fatalities soared in the absence of clear rules and norms.
The good news is that traffic fatalities are at historic lows, thanks in large part to increasingly sophisticated auto designs, advanced safety features and stricter seatbelt and DUI laws.
For example there is little difference over time in alcohol-related traffic fatalities between Maryland and Virginia yet Virginia has significantly higher taxes on beer, wine, and spirits.
Back in 1997, a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that, while the population of drivers over 70 represented 9% of all drivers, they accounted for 14% of all traffic fatalities.
And then there was Richard Nixon mandating a national 55-mph speed limit to help conserve gas in response to the OPEC oil embargo, which served to make everyone at the time driving a big V8-powered car grumpy (and subsequently helped reduce traffic fatalities).
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The recent increase in highway deaths is an abrupt reversal of fortune, and it follows a 26 percent drop in traffic fatalities recorded between 2005 and 2011, which was largely credited to safer cars, stricter state DUI and seatbelt laws and, specifically as far as younger motorists are concerned, licensing procedures that placed increased restrictions on teen driving.
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Worse, the vast amount of truck mileage will have a huge carbon footprint and increase the risk of traffic accidents and fatalities: Large trucks accounted for 8 percent of all fatal traffic accidents in the U.S. according to the most recent data.
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Thousands of kids are killed or injured each year in crashes resulting from improper car-seat use or installation, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration further reporting 33 fatalities last year from heatstroke as a result of children being inadvertently left in cars (we can only assume the latter occurred while their parents were too busy talking on their smartphones to notice).
Still, the number of fatalities is dropping, even though vehicle traffic is rapidly increasing: the number of miles driven in New Mexico each year has increased from 16.5 billion in 1990 to 21.5 billion in 1996.
They were collected primarily through police reports in 2007, death certificates and the number of fatalities registered by the Not-in-Traffic Surveillance system, a virtual data collector of details regarding nontraffic crashes nationwide.
According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, 2.7% of all driver fatalities occur in situations where vision is obscured.
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