What’s currently the biggest risk to your safety? Is it an unsafe workplace? Mental health struggles? Crime and violence? Depending on where you live, your answer may be different than someone else’s. Comparing those answers is where things really get interesting, though, and that’s exactly what the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll sets out to do. And per the recent Gallup report on the 2026 results, Americans’ top safety concern isn’t violent crime — it’s car crashes.
In response to the question, “What is the greatest source of risk to your safety in your daily life?”, 5% of Americans mentioned a personal health condition, 7% chose an answer that got categorized as “other,” 10% said politics, 19% said crime and violence, and 34% said car crashes. That’s a pretty big gap between car crashes and violent crime, too. Accidents killed fewer Americans in 2025 than they did in 2024, but over 36,000 people were killed in 2025, so it’s natural that we’re still afraid of getting pancaked on the road.
What’s especially interesting, though, is that car crashes were still the top concern globally. The global average across 140 countries had 14% of respondents naming car crashes as the biggest risk to their safety — that’s the top figure worldwide. So it’s not like people in other countries don’t recognize the risks on the road. They just don’t worry about getting splattered as much as those in the U.S. do.
Highways, cities, sprawl, and fear
It’s no secret that violent crime has been falling in the U.S. since the 1990s. In recent years, the violent crime rate in the U.S. has been less than half what it was in the early ’90s. But with so much of conservative media and so many Republican politicians dedicated to stoking fears that crime is out of control, you’d think people would rate violent crime higher on the list of risks to their own safety. After all, they hear about it literally all the time.
The problem for that narrative is, people have eyes, and you can’t see violent crimes in your area that don’t exist. You do, however, see dangerous drivers, all sorts of near-misses, and plenty of crashes. Those are real safety threats that you see around you no matter where you live. Which also probably explains why so much of the right-wing narrative around violent crime in this country is focused on those “other” places where “different” people live. Sure, where you live isn’t a literal war zone, but that’s just because you’re good, and people who live in cities are bad.
As our friend Alan Fisher points out in his latest video, there are other reasons so many people old enough to still use Facebook are irrationally terrified of cities, too. Cities used to be really dirty. Industrialization required massive amounts of heat that could really only come from coal, which really did make cities dirty places to live. But many cities around America have cleaned up their act, even if people still cling to beliefs about cities that are 40 years out of date.
Trains and street cars then led to suburbs, and after WWII, America went all in on car ownership and the suburbs. But the New York City of today is a completely different place than it was in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Still, far too many people simply refuse to admit things can change. We could make the changes necessary to slash road deaths and make car crashes something we don’t have to fear nearly as much, but sadly, far too many in the U.S. are more afraid of change than they are of car crashes.
