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Sunday Video: How Safe Is Your City’s Transportation System?

Stephen Fesler - August 09, 2026
Aerial image of Washington, D.C. and statistics on transportation fatalities in the region. (CityNerd)

A lot of noise has been made by the federal government’s transportation secretary about the safety of transit And while tragedy does happen from time to time on transit, the national data shows that it’s rare and not usually the result of crashes or homicide. Fundamentally, the data shows that America’s roads are the disproportionate source of fatalities in the national transportation systems, in large part because of high driving rates and unsafe roadway designs. In this video, Ray Delahanty ranks the country’s most and least safest metropolitan transportation systems in the country, and breaks out the data between road and transit fatalities. Seattle is in the Top 10 safest.