People have a tendency to brush those deaths off as "your own fault", or one off accidents. The media hyperinflation of events doesn't help either. It's actually really interesting to look at studies measuring people's relative evaluations of risk. One tidbit is that back around 9/11 and for a long while thereafter people believed that flying was more dangerous than driving, despite that being very untrue.
I recall that people took the car more, and the plane less, in the aftermath of 9/11. At least partly due to the inconvenience caused by the new security measures at the airports.
5 years later, this increase in road traffic was estimated to kill as many people as were originally dead in the twin towers. Just because people chose the car a bit more, and the plane a bit less.
Their chart is slightly different from mine, in that they're counting deaths per vehicle mile rather than deaths per passenger mile, which greatly favors cars because of their lower passenger capacity.
