If you’re playing the lottery 1 in 5,486 seems like pretty amazing odds. In percentage terms that’s a 0.018225% of striking it rich beyond your wildest dreams. But what if I told you that’s also your chance of dying in any given year? Those are pretty scary odds! In fact, in order to have those same odds of death you’d need to skydive 46 times per year. Thats almost once a week.

So what activity equates to a 1 in 5,486 chance of dying in any given year? Driving your car in the USA baby.

The fatality rate for the US in 2022 was 1.35 deaths for 100,000,000 miles driven. That equates to around 43,000 deaths per year driving your car. Think about that — 43,000 people die every year from auto accidents in the US. That is almost the size of my entire small city! The average American drives around 13,500 miles per year which brings your chance of death to 1 in 5,486.

For comparison, if you fly 13,500 miles your chances of dying are around 1 in 740,740.

I’ve been driving for over 20 years and used to not think much of it. I’ve been in a couple accidents, none of them life threatening and none of them involving other cars. I still continued to drive. It wasn’t until the last several years that I’ve noticed driving get significantly more stressful and seem more dangerous. I’ve had close friends get into incredibly bad accidents and I’d had numerous close calls.

I work remotely so I don’t have to commute anywhere, but I do live in the suburbs. This means that most of my necessities are around 5 miles away and the only bus you’ll see a school bus (which is more and more rare nowadays…school car pickup lines are hilariously congested these days). For many people they’d consider driving a necessity to go those distances, instead I bought an ebike and haven’t used a car for local errands in over a year.

It’s difficult to find the statistics on bike fatalities, but most all of them are due to cars. I am lucky to have an off street trail for quite awhile, but there are still sketchy parts. I live in US suburbia for God’s sake! Of course it’s going to get sketchy on a bike! But even if my risk of dying was higher than in a car, I now lead a much healthier life and have infinitely more fun running errands than before I ditched my car.

The next time you look back on your year of driving, be thankful that your number didn’t get called out of the 43,000.