The population of the US is roughly 310 million people. Using your figure for driving fatalities, 3.1x10^8 / 2.5x10^4 = 1/12400 chance of dying in a car accident. This tracks reasonably well with the admittedly outdated information in [1], which gives the odds of dying at home as 1/7875.
By your reasoning, then, my apartment is about 33% more deathtrap-y than my car, and I should probably consider living out of doors, as well as giving up my car and staying away from roads.
Except that, from the same data, my odds of dying at the hand of another person are about one in sixteen thousand. I live in a large city, so my options are starting to look pretty limited! Subsistence farming may be the only way. (Or perhaps hunting and gathering -- this is prime whitetail country, and there are few enough hunters for deer to've become a serious pest through overbreeding.)
All life is risk, and the outcome is known ahead of time - the probability of dying of something, given long enough, eventually reaches unity. Maintaining a healthy sense of perspective seems warranted.
The population of the US is roughly 310 million people. Using your figure for driving fatalities, 3.1x10^8 / 2.5x10^4 = 1/12400 chance of dying in a car accident. This tracks reasonably well with the admittedly outdated information in [1], which gives the odds of dying at home as 1/7875.
By your reasoning, then, my apartment is about 33% more deathtrap-y than my car, and I should probably consider living out of doors, as well as giving up my car and staying away from roads.
Except that, from the same data, my odds of dying at the hand of another person are about one in sixteen thousand. I live in a large city, so my options are starting to look pretty limited! Subsistence farming may be the only way. (Or perhaps hunting and gathering -- this is prime whitetail country, and there are few enough hunters for deer to've become a serious pest through overbreeding.)
All life is risk, and the outcome is known ahead of time - the probability of dying of something, given long enough, eventually reaches unity. Maintaining a healthy sense of perspective seems warranted.
[1] http://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.php