No One Here Gets Out Alive

Or do they?

The other day, I came across an article on The Discourse Lounge, Darrell Owens’ excellent and well-researched Substack about U.S. housing, transit, urban planning, etc. This particular article - “Businesses Are Getting People Killed” - talked about the distressing trend of traffic violence¹ in the United States. The term traffic violence is popularly applied to events in which motor vehicles hit and injure or kill pedestrians and bicyclists, although it can be applied to vehicle-on-vehicle encounters as well. As a bicyclist, I am aware both from a research and a lived experiences perspective of how incredibly dangerous it is to bike on roads in the United States, so the statistics in this article were not new to me. However, it got me thinking about Mexico (not a hard thing to do, really).

Specifically, it got me thinking about yet another article from last year that I had at one point meant to write a commentary on, but decided against because I didn’t want to elevate it (oh, look at me “elevating” things - don’t I have a swelled head 🙂). This article appeared in Newsweek - which was once a respected U.S. news magazine but has devolved, like most once-respected U.S. media, into mostly a cesspool of click-bait garbage (someday I’ll tell you how I really feel). The click-baity title of that article is More Americans Are Killed in Mexico Every Year Than You Realize. I don’t want to make light of the Americans (who I will hereafter disambiguate as U.S. citizens, or people from the U.S.) who have lost their lives in Mexico: deaths, especially homicides, are tragic. But I do take issue with the narrative around how dangerous Mexico is for visitors; and as regards the Newsweek article, my issue is twofold:

1. You can substitute “Mexico” with just about any other noun, and the headline will still be accurate for many readers.

2. The body of the article itself, like its headline, is sensationalistic and leading, and backed up by poor reporting.

I’ve written about the dangers to U.S. visitors and residents that Mexico poses (or does not pose) before, notably here. But the charts in Darrell Owens’ article on traffic violence inspired me statistically, so I dusted off the digital cobwebs on my totally legal copy of Excel and started looking at some of the data presented in these two articles.

But first, I verified that data by going to more authoritative sources. And, because I have strong feelings and an affinity for bicycling, I decided to focus just on bicycle fatalities on the vehicle violence side of things. So, with that preamble out of the way, here are some numbers:

• According to the U.S. Centers For Disease Control, about 1,000 bicyclists die in crashes involving a motor vehicle in the United States per year (an additional 130,000 are injured).

• According to the United States Department of State, in 2022 (the most recent year that the department publishes statistics on its web site), 46 U.S. citizens were victims of homicide in Mexico (of these, 63% occurred in cities along the U.S./Mexico border).

• In 2022, approximately 33 million people from the U.S. visited Mexico. I assume this number includes full-time residents, but even if it doesn’t the statistics aren’t affected significantly².

• The population of the United States is about 330 million.

Now let’s make these fatalities a function of population. In 2022, 0.0003 percent of the U.S. population was killed on a bicycle. In 2022, 0.00014 percent of the U.S. population visiting or living in Mexico was the victim of homicide. Here’s a graph to help visualize these numbers in relation to one another:

The likelihood of you dying of homicide in Mexico is exceeded by the likelihood of you dying in the United States on a bicycle by slightly over a factor of 2!

Add to this the fact that in the U.S., the number of bicycle - in fact all vehicle-related deaths - are on the rise (the U.S. is the only wealthy country where this fatality trend is on the rise), and we will likely see the bar on the left increase disproportionately to the one on the right.

I swear to Quetzalcoatl, the next person who tells me that it is unsafe to be in Mexico as a U.S. citizen³ is going to get hit over the head with a tire pump.

Seriously though, the narrative that Mexico is a dangerous place for people from the U.S. is absurd when compared to the dangers to U.S. citizens in the U.S. And I only presented bicycle fatalities; gun fatalities in the U.S. completely eclipse bicycle deaths: 20,138 gun deaths in the U.S. in 2022, excluding suicide.

Now if someone from the U.S. asks you if it is safe to go to Mexico, you can show them this article, or offer them the only sensical response there is: yes, just don’t ride a bike to the airport.

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Postscript: 💯 🎉

For those of you not counting along at home, this is my 100th post on Mexico Listo. I want to thank you all for reading, commenting, liking, and not running me over with a car. I find your readership hugely motivating, and I hope to continue to deliver hundreds of new articles (spam?) to your inboxes over the coming years/decades/geologic eras.

¡Viva México!

1. The term “traffic violence” itself is controversial due to the word “violence” connoting intent. I am not interested in that controversy, and thus won’t rat-hole on it here.

2. You data scientists out there will be quick to point out that, from a statistical perspective, one must account for how much time these visitors are spending in Mexico. For the vast majority, that time is a small fraction of a year. I could factor this into the model, but I figured that the same question can be applied to time spent on a bike, which might work out to a similar fraction of a year. In any event, the population-based model I am using I think is justified for the types of comparisons I am making.

3. I am a dual U.S./Mexican citizen, but I am definitely a “gringo” nonetheless, so for the sake of appearances I will wear the “U.S. person” label, if label we must.