Apparently some places, like England and New York City, kept very good records on horse and other traffic accidents. Here's a paper that purports to show that h

Apparently some places, like England and New York City, kept very good records on horse and other traffic accidents. Here's a paper that purports to show that horses were dangerous and even more dangerous than cars: The Dangers of Automobile Travel: A Reconsideration, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739679 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739679 But I quickly read through the entire thing (JSTOR still has free access: cool!) and AFAICT automobiles were far more dangerous than horses, both in absolute fatalities and presumably even more so adjusting for the number of horses and cars per capita. Toward the end the author tacks on train and streetcar deaths just to make automobile deaths look better. Indeed, it's not until the very end where the author isn't constantly drawing conclusions and providing anecdotes that seemingly contradict his own hard data. Only on a per mile basis, and then only a few decades into the age of the automobile (i.e. after traffic controls become common and pedestrians become persona non grata on the street), are automobiles indisputably safer. Considering the utter lack of almost all traffic controls prior to the automobile and the way that pedestrians intermixed with horses, the figures are actually astonishing. More astonishing when you look at train and streetcar deaths, which were apparently incredibly lethal. I'm glad I found that paper because almost all other sources I found--which completely lacked any hard evidence--claimed horses were far more dangerous. (So does this one, though the data suggests otherwise.)