You are misinterpreting the grandparent: Their claim is comparing an event of running a red light vs speeding once. Your statistics have the incidence of both b

You are misinterpreting the grandparent: Their claim is comparing an event of running a red light vs speeding once. Your statistics have the incidence of both behaviors already baked in. So with your numbers, you could say that all the speeding your average driver does in a year is riskier than all the red light running they do in a year. It's precisely the difference in the incidence of the behavior that matters here though. I don't have specific numbers, but I think it's a very safe claim that most drivers speed far more often than they run red lights. Many a commuter will be speeding a large percentage of the time they are not in a traffic jam. On the other hand, I don't see of any people in the US that just run any and all red lights as a matter of course. And why does it happen that way? Because we realize that running a red light in most circumstances is crazy dangerous. People tend to try to avoid extremely dangerous behavior if they can help it, so you will find few fatalities per year, but that's because almost nobody does it. How many Americans die each year to Russian roulette? Probably fewer than either red lights or speeding, although I'd say playing Russian roulette is far more dangerous than either. Given the numbers you found, running a red light would be just as dangerous as speeding if people ran a red light 13 times less often than they speed (for whichever time definition we choose for a unit of speeding). I suspect that people speed far more often than that, compared to running red lights. We are in a similar boat regarding people killed in traffic by cyclists. How many cyclist-hours do we see in US roads, vs cars? There's also probably very few people killed in the US by being killed by T-35 tanks running red lights, but that's not because T-35s are safe and we should just use them and then ignore traffic signals. Running someone over with a bicycle while running a red light is still probably far less dangerous than acting the same way in a car, or an old T-35, but we can't tell that just by looking at fatalities alone.