THE HORSELESS CARRIAGE WAS A MARSHALLIAN IMPROVEMENT.

People with little sense of history might treat the automobile as a Faustian bargain, in which people gain mobility at the cost of thousands of lives lost each year in the United States alone.  I deliberately used the archaic expression "horseless carriage" to call attention to the possibility that the absence of a horse was a feature.  That hearkens to a wisecrack somebody made about doomsday environmentalists years ago, something to the effect that a Gilded Age version of the Club of Rome would have extrapolated humanity smothering in horse dung by the turn of the (nineteenth to twentieth) century.  Or if not smothering, perhaps being sickened: the dawning of the germ theory of disease brought with it recognition that all that horse poop in the streets had to be hazardous to your health.  Yes, and the urban infrastructure of carriage houses on alleys behind the house rather than facing the street in the manner of today's snout houses might have been a way to conceal some of the stink and the slop, although that placement of the stables might have made the spread of epizootics more widespread.

But then comes Reason's Chelsea Follett with a further reason to go horseless.  "Crashing Through the Snow: The Grim Sarcasm Behind 'Jingle Bells.'" Yes, I recall the full version of the song, not the etiolated cuts that fill the airwaves these days (it's so bad that some young radio guys couldn't figure out "Parson Brown" in "Winter Wonderland" despite the stanza itself providing more than enough context to puzzle it out without puzzling for three hours until their puzzlers were sore.)

In the full version, the sleigh gets into a drifting bank, and all aboard were upsot.

In the next verse, which is [these days] often skipped, the narrator relates being thrown out of the sleigh onto his back and getting laughed at by a romantic rival. His misfortune was relatively minor, but being thrown from a sleigh or carriage was not always a laughing matter.

During the time of horse-drawn vehicles, accidents frequently caused not only delays and inconveniences but also injuries and deaths. The British historian Paul Hair called the horse "one of man's most dangerous tools," arguing that "it is likely that per unit of travel the horse was more dangerous than the motor vehicle."

He quotes Britain's registrar general as noting in 1865 that "street accidents by horse carriages kill more people in a year than railways" and estimates a horse-related mortality rate of around 55 deaths annually per million people in 1874. In 2020, there were 1,516 road deaths in the United Kingdom. Divided by the current U.K. population of 67.2 million, that translates into a mortality rate from motor vehicle accidents of about 23 deaths annually per million people, making modern car rides more than twice as safe as Victorian horse carriage rides. And car deaths are becoming more rare almost everywhere.

The full study looks at a variety of violent deaths in Britain.  The sources do not allow the authors to work out the death rates per passenger mile.  Sometimes it's solo riders thrown from their horses, that's the nineteenth century's analogue to motorcycle fatalities.  Sometimes it's multiple people hurt or killed when that surrey with a fringe on top, or that one horse open sleigh, turns over.

In the United States, that motorcycle is still a relatively dangerous way to travel.

If there were ever doubts as to the inherent dangers of riding a motorcycle, figures from Ian Savage at Northwestern University should put paid to them. In his research paper entitled 'Comparing the fatality risks in United States transportation acrossmodes and over time', Savage analyzes the number of passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009.

With a rate of 212.57, riding a motorcycle is by far the most deadly way to get around - an enormous distance ahead of the second-most dangerous mode of transport - a car or light truck - with 7.28 fatalities per billion passenger miles. To give this some more perspective, Savage writes: "A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks."

There's more discussion of the fatality risks paper here and the supporting tables of the full paper is available here.  It's going to be harder to put together any sort of time series of horse-related fatalities in the nineteenth century.  I suspect, though, that the horseless carriage offered a more favorable tradeoff of mobility against injury and death than personal transportation with a horse did.