The Roads to Ruin

Day in, day out, 365 times a year, a passenger plane crashing somewhere in the European Union? On average, 110 people killed, 4,650 injured, every day? Impossible, of course. There would be panic, uproar, governments falling in the face of such unremitting carnage. But the only lie in this horrendous scenario is the word plane. Substitute car, and that is the annual swath in the E.U. — 40,000 people dead, another 1.7 million injured, with a little help from trucks, bicycles, motorbikes and errant pedestrians. Numbers to make a bin Laden blanch.

The sad statistics come from a white paper...