How many people die in road accidents worldwide each year?

How to get close to this number

Scale from a country you know. A wealthy country with good road safety sees a few thousand deaths a year on roads for tens of millions of people; most of the world has rates several times higher. Applying a global average rate to eight billion people produces a figure in the low millions.

The per-interval conversion in the explanation makes it comprehensible: one death every twenty-six seconds, continuously. Large annual mortality figures are almost impossible to weigh until converted into a rate, and this conversion is what turns a statistic into something with the texture of an ongoing event.

The comparison at the end is the one that should change how the figure is read: road injury is the leading cause of death for people aged five to twenty-nine, ahead of every disease. Cause-of-death rankings by age group look nothing like overall rankings, and for young people the dominant risk is not illness but traffic — which is a public health fact that receives a fraction of the attention it warrants.