Giant Range Differences

Check out this chart of fatalities per 100,000 from motor vehicle crashes and murders in the largest U.S. cities, 2019, which I saw from M. Nolan Gray. He's a former city planner, now a researcher at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs:

As always, click to enlarge for better readability.

I zoomed in first to see where Minneapolis came out. (Saint Paul is never on these lists.) It didn't do too badly on either number, relatively, and did very well on the crash rate, especially. Which makes me shudder, given how I know things are.

After that, the thing that jumped out was the huge ranges among the numbers. 

• St. Louis is highest on murders and second highest on traffic crashes, beaten only by Memphis for that. More people die from traffic crashes per 100,000 in St. Louis (and Memphis) than from murder in most of the rest of the cities. But still, more than three times as many die from murder than crashes in St. Louis, and almost 50% more in Memphis. So that's a lot of both, especially in St. Louis.
  
• By comparison, there are 17 cities where you're more likely to die from a car crash than a murder, all located in the West, Southwest, or Southeast. Why? It seems to be a mix of the Midwest and Northeast being safer places to drive, walk or bike, and some of the West and Southwest having lower murder rates. Southeastern cities are a mixed bag of huge swings of both numbers.
  
• The cities with the least divergence between the two fatality rates are San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and Los Angeles, with Salt Lake City and New York not far behind. You have about even odds of dying of either a crash or murder in those places. Congratulations!
  
• The top five safest cities overall, in descending order, were New York, Raleigh, Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston. (Raleigh really needs to get its crash rate down, though.)
• You'll note that Chicago, the favorite whipping boy of Republicans and the Right for constant murders, is nowhere near the high end of that rate, and is in fact far below lots of red-state cities like Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Kansas City. It's also below Atlanta, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore,  Richmond, and Washington, D.C. About the same number of people were killed by car crashes in Birmingham as were killed by murder in Chicago.

I have a friend who has just recently started a job as the planner for non-motorized transportation planning in Kansas City, where the crash death rate was almost 16 per 100,000. That's a pretty bad rate (though there are seven cities worse). She's got her work cut out for her!