A few years ago, I noticed the number of people who died from gun deaths and the number of people who died from car crashes was roughly the same — about 35,000 per year. This is, of course, a grim a coincidence but I kind of extrapolated this theory that 35k is roughly the number of preventable deaths most Americans are willing to accept while just blithely going about their lives.

It’s obviously a silly and naive view of the world and really my own confirmation bias at work — I despise both gun and car culture and the wretched way they work on the world, and this numerical coincidence fit neatly into my worldview.

We’re starting to get statistics of how the world is changing since the start of the pandemic and it’s horrific to see these two numbers have both risen sharply, in nearly equal proportion. Despite much lower rates of driving in 2020, deaths from car crashes rose 7% and then another 10% in 2021. In 2020, there were 14% more gun deaths than in 2019.

In a piece for The Upshot in the Times, Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano dig into the data as to why the United States is one of the few developed countries where car deaths rose during the pandemic. The story is a familiar one of American exceptionalism — where other countries have made sensible changes to infrastructure and regulations on car size, the U.S. has simply allowed car manufactures build bigger more dangerous cars while cars, like guns before, have become another front in the culture wars.

Safety advocates and government officials lament that so many deaths are often tolerated in America as an unavoidable cost of mass mobility. But periodically, the illogic of that toll becomes clearer: Americans die in rising numbers even when they drive less. They die in rising numbers even as roads around the world grow safer. American foreign service officers leave war zones, only to die on roads around the nation’s capital.

In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads, the government estimates. And the recent rise in fatalities has been particularly pronounced among those the government classifies as most vulnerable — cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians.

I was living in New York City at the start of the pandemic and the mayor declared an open streets plan that was the absolute bare minimum of sacrificing some car space for public use. Cops — most of whom live outside of the city and experience the city through their cruisers — refused to enforce even this basic plan. I made daily calls to my council member and borough president to no avail. I would drag the barricades back across the streets myself late at night only to see them broken up the next morning. The empty streets were too enticing for reckless drivers from across state lines whose nightly races added a 100-decibel cacophony to that already anxious summer.

Since moving to a smaller city I’ve been advocating for more bike lanes and even happily seen a short section of a major thoroughfare through town converted from four treacherous lanes to two with a turn lane and two bike lanes. The asphalt hasn’t even finished yet and of course drivers have taken to every media outlet to complain about the injustice of sharing “their roads” with “privileged” bikers, despite the fact the new configuration is such an obvious safety and convenience win for everyone. It’s maddening.

I no longer think there’s any upper limit to the amount of death Americans will accept before they change their lifestyles. Over a million Covid deaths, children slaughtered in their schools by weapons built for soldiers, cyclists crushed under the wheels of ever larger trucks. We know how to solve these problems.