Marker check · 3 questions

Safety habits

For adults under 45, injuries — mostly road crashes — rival disease as a cause of death. The boring stuff works: seatbelts cut front-seat crash deaths roughly in half, helmets do similar for head injury, and handheld phone use multiplies crash risk several-fold. These deltas are small on average precisely because crashes are rare — but they’re among the cheapest years on this list.

The research

  • NHTSA — seatbelts reduce front-seat fatality risk ~45%
  • Olivier & Creighton, Int J Epidemiol 2017 — bicycle helmet meta-analysis
  • Dingus et al., PNAS 2016 — naturalistic driving: handheld phone crash risk